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@320x200@post.lurk.org
Post #1788082
2025-11-24 11:01 UTC
@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.
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@320x200 @l03s Thank you so much for these thoughts! (And for lurk's 1337 char limit 😉)
What probably hit me the most in your article is that piracy is not illegal anymore, at least for some actors. But clearly piracy needs to remain illegal to fulfill its valuable role to make materials available to communities that otherwise would have no way of accessing them, vetting them for quality/usefulness (not hoarding), and preventing piracy projects to grow into "platforms" that then run on some platform logic. The celebration and activist expansion of legal loopholes that allow some forms of piracy which, for instance, the Swedish Piratbyrån pushed forward, laid the groundwork for where we are now kind of.
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