Peer2Politics

How one researcher created a pirate bay for science more powerful than even libraries at top universities.

The Pirate Book - A compilation of stories about sharing, distributing and experiencing cultural contents outside the boundaries of local economies, politics, or laws

A few days ago a Dutch movie director asked people to upload a copy of one of his older films onto The Pirate Bay. The filmmaker had become fed up with the fact that copyright issues made his work completely unavailable through legal channels. To his surprise, pirates were quick to deliver.

Long overdue, a change in the law to make it legal to copy for own personal use. But does not go far enough, we need a removal of copy protection and digital rights management from DVDs and e-books.

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.

Megaupload founder promises new appeal in case that's dragged on for nearly 4 years.

In the decade and a half since Napster first emerged, forever changing the face of digital culture, the claim that “internet pirates killed the music industry” has become so ubiquitous that it is treated as common knowledge. Piracy is a scourge on legitimate businesses and hard-working artists, we are told, a “cybercrime” similar to identity fraud or even terrorism.