Post #1788081

2025-11-22 11:58 UTC

@320x200 @l03s Great piece. Many threads to possibly continue with. What I currently find interesting is the new role and modes of organization of piracy. While already in the early 2000's it was known that for instance record labels would seed an album and watch downloads to help deciding what could be the next single, today piracy platforms and what you call the ICT industry seem to work hand in hand. Perhaps going beyond the undiscriminating claim to everything digital by ICT, piracy aggregators like Anna's Archive just by their technical and organizational infrastructure play a huge role to enable extraction, in case of AA even willingly. I wonder what you think about these developments?

Replies (1)

@320x200@post.lurk.org 2025-11-24 11:01

@despens @l03s hard to reply meaningfully in a few words 😅 Let's say that I was not surprised when NVIDIA started to defend shadow libraries. Makes complete sense to me. From what I've seen/experienced in the past decades, there is usually a significant overlap between digital commons activists and pirate digital data hoarders. IMO, it is usually justified by a mix of cherry-picked libertarian ideas that can be used to retro-rationalise what could be seen as hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance. More generally though I think the many forms of piracy would also need to be unpacked further to revisit how it operates and what could be learned from them in this context. I am specially thinking of small size specialized private torrent trackers (for its strong and dedicated attachment to the materials shared/curated), and the scene (for its governance and transaction system). These models have been often overlooked by digital commons activists, specifically because of their lack of public interface, which is seen as a kind of excluding practices, but I think this is a weak critique, specially given how the net has turned into a dumpster fire of corpo extraction.

Open ##1788082