Towards a 'Moral Economy of Copyright Infringement': Academic Paywalls, Freedom of Information & The Case of #pdftribute
This is a blog post in which I have synthesised some of my analysis for the final term paper for the IDS Unruly Politics module.
"Information is power. But like all power,
there are some who wish to keep it for themselves."
- Aaron Schwartz
While scanning documents in the IDS library and most university libraries across the world, one can easily be bombarded by signs on the wall above warning you of not committing copyright infringement or face severe penalties. Guidelines of 'fair use' with details on how to protect yourself accompany these signs, often including that up to 10% of a book or merely one article from a journal is sufficient to not commit copyright infringement. Even during the first week of IDS, during the library induction students are warned against this, even that they should not e-mail articles to other students who may also be able to access them through the same paywalled channels that we are privileged to as university students. Despite this, a number of us find no moral qualms with committing what some could consider 'copyright infringement.' Perhaps this has to do with the hefty price tag of university education. Maybe we are considering that, upon graduation, access to all of this knowledge will be severely limited - despite the fact that many of us will want to continue to conduct research or even simply to engage in intellectual stimulation - and so perhaps we are 'planning ahead'. Regardless of particular motivations or decision-making, this predicament connects to larger, global movements and initiatives surrounding academic articles, public knowledge and publisher paywalls. The case of the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute is one such case which deserves further investigation, and it is my opinion that the theoretical concept of the 'moral economy' can provide another puzzle piece to the effort of comprehending and expanding such freedom of information initiatives.
#pdftribute
On 11 January 2013, Internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Schwartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment. Just days before, prosecutorial negotiations had broken down in a legal case where he was serving as a defendant for illegally downloading and sharing freely online hundreds of thousands of paywalled and copyrighted academic articles from an MIT database. He was facing the possibility of decades in prison and millions of dollars in fines for what many, including himself, viewed as liberating privately-held knowledge from for-profit companies freely to the public. In moral terms, his actions were widely seen by like-minded supporters and activists as embracing morals of open access to information and knowledge.
The following day, a development economist at the World Bank published her collected academic PDFs online for free, many of which were copyrighted and held behind paywalls from academic publishers. She encouraged others to do the same in memoriam of Schwartz, using the hashtag #pdftribute. An Oxford Ph. D. student picked up on this and continued to spread the word on Twitter and other social media platforms. By the morning of 13 January, academics across the world were posting their own paywalled and non-paywalled articles online for free, sharing the links on Twitter. This was further encouraged by activists groups such as Occupy Wall Street and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous, as well as civil society organisations and various global citizens, publicising these efforts on social media. Soon thereafter, there was quite a number of media articles covering the subject, including opinion-editorials voicing their support for the efforts for academics to 'liberate' their paywalled articles.
Throughout many of these Tweets, there were continuously-evoked notions of morality and justice: that people were entitled to access information and knowledge as a right, and that capitalist forces - such as the academic publishers who profit tremendously off of copyrighted material from academics - should be rebelled against. Although the efforts did have their critics, vast numbers of Twitter users were evoking similar notions of freedom of information which Schwartz stood for and were igniting further conversation about proprietary rights of publishers with reference to academic knowledge that enhances 'the social good'. In essence, there were vast amounts of moral claims being made, referencing how copyright law in these circumstances was unfair, how it led to the loss of a brilliant activist and how the public was entitled to knowledge.
'Moral Economy' in Conventional and Expanded Uses
In E.P. Thompson's 1971 essay "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," social scientists (and hopefully other readers) were introduced to the term moral economy. He was discussing the bread riots that occurred during the 17th and 18th Centuries in Europe where spikes in the price of grain led to unaffordable food prices for vast amounts of people. By consequence, large numbers of citizens in various towns collectively mobilised and rioted to gain access to food for survival. Instead of assuming this as spontaneous and merely due to hunger, Thompson claimed there was an underlying 'moral economy' of the group by which issues of fairness in access to food was considered more important than staying within law-abiding, peaceful norms of social behaviour. This assessment, like James Scott's use of the term to discuss peasant societies in Southeast Asia, constitutes a more conventional use of the term: merely to be described as an object of study in pre-capitalist societies.
Upon expanding the definition by the likes of the University of Lancaster's Andrew Sayer to include the moral economy as an object of study and a mode of inquiry, we are led to view the term as the interplays between cultural and social values and economic policy and law (and vice versa). In this wider definition, one can conclude that all economies are moral economies. Even further, cultural theoretical uses of the term - such as J.P. Olivier de Sardan's article "A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?" - provide us with an expanded definition by which certain personal and communal moral logics sit at odds with particular laws. The lines between what corruption is or is not, like the lines between what is illegal and legal, can be quite blurred within individual choices. As people are situated within vast networks that entail their own senses of duties, decisions deemed 'moral' by the individual - despite its possible illegality - weighs heavier in choosing what to do or not to do. Given these enhanced uses of 'moral economy', this can also be appropriated to discuss freedom of information activities such as #pdftribute.
Moral Economy of Copyright Infringement
If one permits me to employ a slightly linear view of history for the moment, it is possible to imagine that as we have moved from more agrarian to more knowledge economies - and as what is considered 'vital' to humanity as moved from biological sustenance (given the general abundance of food supplies in industrialised nations and elsewhere) to information sustenance - then we might be able to utilise an adapted version of the conventional 'moral economy' concept to speak of freedom of information movements. This 'vitality' includes the ability for humans to make informed political, social and personal decisions and to build - in their own perceptions - 'clearer' visions of the world as it is, rather than as those in power might like us to believe it to be. Again, employing a linear view of history, if we are to view ourselves as 'cyborgs' - that technology and humanity are no longer inseparable and believe that this will continue to increase as being the case - then digitally accessing, reading and sharing information without intervention or fear can be viewed as one of our many human rights.
The space being occupied is no longer the streets or the bakers' shops but the digital platforms of online social media, and targets of such outrage are no longer the capitalists controlling grains but the capitalists withholding knowledge from public viewing. This can lead us to see #pdftribute and other similar initiatives as a global, online, decentralised moral economy that is openly criticising and fighting back against capitalist forces and institutions which vast numbers of people view as against public interests and notions of 'the common good'. As these discussions continue to elevate across the world, and publics continue to demand access to information from state and private institutions, the 'moral economy' of copyright infringement will likely continue to expand through the minds of global citizens and, by consequence, continue to shape economic policy and law in favour what might be considered the 'social good.'
- Posted by Chris
