New Report Shines Much-Needed Light On Shadow Libraries Around The World

Techdirt readers with long memories may recall a post back in 2011 about a 440-page report entitled "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies." This detailed study effectively debunked the entire foundation of US attempts to impose maximalist copyright regimes on other countries. That report was edited by Joe Karaganis, who has put together another collection of articles, called "Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education", that are also likely to be of interest to Techdirt readers. As Karaganis writes in his introduction:

To a large extent, our work on Shadow Libraries started where Media Piracy ended, with the confirmation that the main factors underlying high rates of piracy in the developing world were the obvious ones: high prices for legal media, low incomes, and the continued diffusion of cheap copying technologies.

Unsurprisingly, Karaganis takes Sci-Hub as the emblematic "shadow library":

As everyone from [Sci-Hub's creator] Elbakyan to Elsevier knew, however, Sci-Hub's importance was not its permanence as a service but its status as a proof of concept. Its core archive of fifty million articles was freely available and its basic search and archive features easily replicated.

...

If Elbakyan's story has struck a chord, it is in part because it brings this contradiction in the academic project into sharp relief -- universalist in principle and unequal in practice. Shadow Libraries is a study of that tension in the digital era.

The rest of the 321 pages explores how that tension -- between striving for free and frictionless access to all human knowledge and the copyright industry's attempts to turn learning into a luxury product -- is playing out in eight different countries. Techdirt has covered many of the stories -- for example, those in Russia, India and Argentina. But the report fleshes out the bare facts previously reported here, and provides far more context and analysis. The detailed history of Library Genesis, a precursor to Sci-Hub in Russia, is particularly fascinating. For other countries such as South Africa, Poland, Brazil and Uruguay, the new studies offer insights into regions rarely discussed in the West, and provide good starting points for deeper understanding of those countries. As Karaganis notes, the new study is a transitional one:

catching the moment of widespread digitization of materials and related infrastructure but not yet the digitization of the wider teaching, learning, and research ecosystem, and not the stabilization of legal models and frameworks that can keep pace with the growth of higher education and the global scale of emerging knowledge communities.

Importantly, though, the underlying dynamics of sharing knowledge are the same as those driving the unauthorized distribution of media materials, discussed in the 2011 study:

this informal copy culture is shaped by high prices, low incomes, and cheap technology -- and only in very limited ways by copyright enforcement. As long as the Internet remains "open" in the sense of affording privacy and anonymity, shadow libraries, large and small, will remain powerful facts of educational life. As in the case of music and movies, we think the language of crisis serves this discussion poorly. This is an era of radical abundance of scholarship, instructional materials, and educational opportunity. The rest is politics.

Those are points we've made here on Techdirt many times before. We are enjoying an era of unprecedented digital abundance, which the copyright industries are fighting to shut down in order to preserve their outdated business models based on scarcity. One way they try to do that is to attack the Internet's openness by striving to weaken privacy and anonymity online, regardless of the collateral harm this causes. The importance of shadow libraries in global higher education is another reason to resist that.