Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism
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How many of today's hackers got interested in computers through pirated content first?
Also, I, like most teens in the early 2000s, had a pirated copy of Photoshop 7.
Back in the 80 and 90's you could hardly buy real software for home computers, even if you wanted to do so.
All tapes and floppy disks that were sold in shops and bazaars across the country were counterfeit. Lisbon and Porto were probably the only two major cities were some shops selling real original software.
Only software being sold for the enterprise was legit.
Fast forward to 2016 and those bazaars and shops selling counterfeit software as legit are long gone, but everyone has a friend that knows where to get stuff.
Open source has helped to reduce that, but many still don't care, because they want the real software that everyone is using and in times of crisis are not going to pay what companies are asking for. Even when explained how production costs in software are distributed.
For example, the majority uses Android and WP, as not everyone can afford an iOS device. Those that can, usually jailbreak it shortly afterwards, with the purpose of installing pirated apps.
I bet no countryman is going to contradict me, that even in 2016, it is possible to get the usual CD and DVD listings at the university from fellow students, from shops around the corner that provide the desired set of software, in spite of police efforts to track them down.
The thinking is: why buy it if I can pirate it? Especially when it costs something like 1% of my monthly income (for just 1 MP3) or 20%-1000% (for software). Even the most ethically minded tend to think: who loses if I pirate it? Most of the times these products come from faraway corporations making billions of dollars (frequently more than the whole GDP of the country you're living in). It's hard to muster empathy for that.
So far we've discussed people in less wealthy eurozone countries choosing between paying a significant portion of their income and pirating.
Thats bad, in a way we're describing tools that cost nothing, but are priced in a way that whole economies don't have practical access to them.
It gets worse when you consider places like Africa, where every electronic record of an idea is priced out of reach. Can you imagine if your whole country was basically denied access to reference materials, textbooks, and popular culture? The very ideas that could allow you to work your way out of poverty are withheld.
That is really the boot of the privileged stepping on the neck of the poor. And people feel it and understand that.
For example, I paid what is equivalent today (inflation corrected) 17 USD to get the DEMO copy of Wolfenstein 3D.
And to me, paying 17 USD for the DEMO of Wolfenstein 3D, was the coolest stuff ever, because I could play it in first place!
When I heard of "doom", the "legendary game that is wolfenstein 3D but with green floors that cause damage and bloody monsters", I wanted it badly... All I could find about it was hearsay, no legal copies, even of a demo existed, no pirated copies existed either! The few people that played it was only on someone else computer, they described it to me, and I really wanted to see it, they described a technical marvel, something awesome!
My dad is a engineer, he was hired by Kia Motors to do some contract stuff for them, he found out that the CEO (or president, or some other extremely high level executive, forgot the details, I was just a kid) of Brazil Kia Motors had a imported legal copy of Doom, and Doom2, he mentioned to the guy, and he made a copy for me, 20 floppies.
I took care of them like if they were the most precious things ever, because floppies that I had were easy to corrupt, and Doom, and Doom2 was too priceless to lose, and it took too much work to get it (I ended visiting Kia motors with my dad several times, and helping a bit when I was allowed to, the total effort to get the thing was something like several months of visiting Kia a lot, nagging people, paying attention, helping install steel cable structures...).
And it was worth it, Doom was legendary as I imaginated in my head (even using PC Speaker audio, because a real sound car costed here about 20 times the monthly mininum wage), I wanted to make it too, I wanted to be a programmer able to create my own Doom, I needed to learn C, and whatnot, the game was fun, and working a lot to get that pirated copy was very worth it.
Then I wonder, what would have happened if Doom and Doom2 had some strong DRM that prevented the Kia executive from making a copy for me?
However, this isn't just gratuitous. Here the issue is similar with the sci-hub one: there's a fairly legitimate motivation for piracy, so there's a lot of comments over "free knowledge so copyright is theft", and a bit of "piracy is theft". But not all piracy is equal, and sharing knowledge (research papers, etc) is useful and participate into making people more informed, but the bulk of piracy is part of the problem.
1) It's diverting considerable effort that could go into free software. If you had to either pay for Photoshop or use a free solution, Gimp and Krita would get insanely more resources. In other words, piracy is a key element in closed-software dominance.
2) Popular movies and TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles. So sharing research papers is not the same thing as what commonly falls under the "piracy" moniker.
That's what that snark meant.
Re #2: That's the funniest conspiracy theory I've heard all year. But don't take it from me - I edit tvtropes so I'm in on it too.
Oops. That was snark. :)
>But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all.
I'm not interested in getting my point accross, just in having fun. People have different objectives. Why do you want so much to tell me what I should do?
Now regarding your #2, there are many links between TV exposure and bad school grades. Everybody on HN love to say that you must be a pretty idiot to read the dailymail or watch fox news, so a correlation between low intellectual content media consumption and low intelligence would harly surprise anybody. Yet you reply with "That's the funniest conspiracy theory", a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument.
As you see, the whole conversation is rather useless, so snark is good enough.
Maybe my objective is to tell you what you should do and you shouldn't judge my objectives? I don't know.
There's assumptions you have to make if you want to have a healthy conversation. For example, the assumption that when someone enters a conversation as an active participant, they're not just here to waste everyone's time. That's essentially trolling.
> correlations
Just because you have "links between TV exposure and bad school grades" doesn't mean "TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles". If I told you there's a link between knife usage and missing fingers, would you tell me knives are made to reduce the average amount of fingers?
> a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument.
If you don't want to be ridiculed and want your points to be answered seriously, maybe you shouldn't be so snarky all the time and hear people out when they tell you to stop.
You can't have it both ways. You can't be an arse to everybody and then expect them to treat you with respect.
They are made to make money. The ones that 'keep people as uneducated imbeciles' are an unfortunate byproduct.
The outcome of downloading research papers or educational content is not the same as downloading entertainment.
That was my first thought, too. Ignoring the legal issues, that is pretty clever.
Pretty damn clever, for sure! Now Wikipedia is just a network for them!
I'm not saying that current copyright system isn't completely screwed up and in need of reform, but I don't think disregarding content creators is an optimal solution.
Using value to determine undercompensation ignores that markets work on price, and often things of low intrinsic value are priced higher than others with high intrinsic value.
An encyclopedia with broad coverage clearly has greater intrinsic value than a Star Wars Blu-ray, yet the market has priced Star Wars Blu-rays as more expensive.
Price is an extremely rough heuristic on the median or average valuation of an object. However, the majority can often be short-sighted at times, leading those who are looking more longer term to make statements like "the price doesn't reflect the intrinsic value of this thing". But even then, the big picture thinkers are of course assuming that the long view is the "correct view", when really, there is no single "correct view". How would one even go about attempting to define such a thing? It's all subjective.
If the outcome of long view -- ie, valuing education and information over watching star wars -- is less poverty, more self-reliance, the ability of a population to provide better for basic biological needs like food and water and shelter, then what you're really looking at isn't a subjective difference of value systems, but a question of delaying gratification.
That is, sure the price of "star wars" is higher because people would rather watch star wars most of the time than put in two hours towards, say, a 500-hour education project that's going to benefit them in the long run. Yet those same people would rather live in the future where they did have those skills.
In that sense, there is such a thing as intrinsic value, and its basis is shared human biology and universal needs. Asking what behaviors and choices ultimately provide for those needs can be objective, at least to a degree.
Would you say that the price to save a life equally matches the value of a life? Doesn't this show a disparity between the "market value" of something and its actual value?
Copying is not theft, but copyright sure is.
Unless you are talking about serial editions, etc.
Mine has been that contributors (authors, editors, performers, researchers, etc) increase information content, complexity. Kind of a information theoretic metaphor, not that I truly grok that discipline.
There are plenty of ways to seek compensation for the creation of information, with only a minute subset of them requiring copyright monopoly to function.
While Wikipedia may be attempting to colonize Angola with some of its community conduct values, the population there has another view of Wikipedia's purpose which might be equally valid.
Forced, to the extent that they cannot afford to use other services that are not zero rated. The article mentions $2.5 for 50 Mb which is quite expensive by any measure.
It comes down to money, really. Do we put a "you must be this rich to use the internet" sign up on the planet's communications, or do we allow people to bring their culture and ideas to the party despite their poverty?
This whole thing reminds me of UseNet in the early days. It was supposed to be about news and conversations. It ended up being about sharing copyrighted content, because it was one of the only ways we could do it.
So we (Westerners) misused our internet services to share copyrighted content in the early days of our internet experience, why are we even surprised, let alone objecting, that others are doing the same?
If we give free drugs for certain diseases to a poor country, would that mean that we enforce our "Western view on health" on them, and that they are actually entitled to get all drugs for free, otherwise it is a form of colonialism?
Folks in poor countries aren't stupid, and know Facebook isn't just being nice. Zero-rating strangles local startups who have to compete with the free walled garden; it is a spigot for western culture, which many object to[2]; and it smacks of a particularly Valley-flavored mix of paternalism, greed, and the sort of tote-bagger do-gooderism that led to some major travesties of charity. (You could go look up how Jello Biafra picked his stage name on Wikipedia, over a zero-rated link, if you like.)
Suffice to say, there are good reasons why many people in poor countries are extremely wary of westerners bearing gifts.
This bit isn't directed at the parent, and is something I wanted to say in a different thread about poverty, but here's a rule of thumb that may help: If you observe something that doesn't make sense to you, it is likely that you don't have the whole picture. This rule applies to the behavior of people with less money than you, as well.
[1] If you're really interested, reading some history of colonialism would be good. I don't know your background, but if it involved typical high school U.S. history, you likely learned that colonialism was a sort of adventure-phase where westerners explored and planted flags and whatnot, mostly ignoring the commercial interests driving it. And a lot of the horror.
[2] Not even going to get in to that one, aside from saying that if leading contenders in the Republican primary can hate on U.S. culture, so can folks who actually got the pointy end of the stick.
On piracy, of course you're absolutely right - given the existence of a storage mechanism, someone will put stuff in it. See also: hacks that use dynamic DNS updates to store and share information.
I'm in the UK. Free mobile broadband at something like 256Kbits with cheap USB dongles would allow access for all children & low income adults who could find a suitable client device (recycled laptop/cheap smartish phone whatever). Sort of basic income argument applied to Internet connectivity.
Am I being colonialist? Remember I live in the country that more or less invented colonialism!
My proposition is 'basic income Internet' provided at low cost in each country by $Government and $PreferredSupplier. Lowish bandwidth, possibly with fair use style bandwidth cap.
All currently existing legal frameworks remain in place in $Country.
It isn't really classic colonialism of course (we're not talking about enslaving a nation and stealing their goods). But if the basic income internet were not in fact provided by $Government, but instead by $corporation or $otherGovernment, and carried with it strings - "abide by $otherGovernment's laws while using the internet here in this country", then you could argue that's a colonialist approach. It's especially problematic when governments are subverted to transmit corporatist legal frameworks.
In your example in the most basic sense, it's not colonialist - it's just good sense, a government providing a basic level of access to the internet to all.
On the other hand to all of this, I feel like sometimes we're missing the mountain while staring at molehills. Yes, facebook's free basics seem like a naked grab for users and an attempt to stifle homegrown innovation in countries that don't have a lot of network infrastructure. On the other hand, we're still very much dealing with actual colonialism in our global economy. The fact that it's cheaper to ship cotton to Bangladesh to make t-shirts that in turn get shipped back to the US for me to wear (than, say, making the shirt in the US where the cotton is grown) says a lot about the influence of north/western economies on the rest of the world. We (meaning northern and western nations for the most part) still extract tremendous value from the countries we used to explicitly call "colonies". This is probably a much bigger problem (both ethically and in terms of long-term sustainability of our markets)
But I wouldn't fund only access to just my website, I'd fund access to the whole thing.
Which is my objection to zero-rating.
And yes, I'd see this as an absolutely worthwhile use of philanthropic donations if/when I ever make enough to do that.
They are not forced to use Wikipedia. They just happen to live in Africa, where most people live in 19th century by Western/Northern standards and they are hacking their way to 21st century. What would you do if you had to pay 80% of your salary for 1Gb of internet?
The hacker culture is about "creatively circumventing limitations of systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes". I can't find a better example of it.
Let the others call them pirates, but here I think we should celebrate what they did and call them by what they really are, true hackers.
I was just questioning the sense of entitlement that is apparently hidden in the "colonialism" criticism, but this seems to be so ideological that it's hard to get to a basic agreement. Different views on the world, I guess.
That said, I can also understand the sentiment of feeling "colonialized" when people are only allowed to use something under conditions/mores imposed by a "foreign party".
Different world views then? I think it's more like two sides of the same coin...
But it seems like Wikipedia are conscious of that, so they've taken a hands-off approach to this.
File sharing is a big resource hog. It's a totally different story.
So if I roll in and say "Here have this access to this thing everyone in the world claims is an economic and social miracle. Free!" and then later once you start using it I roll back around and say "oh yeah, by the way you have to follow the laws of the United States, the laws of a country you are entirely unrepresented by, if you want to use this thing that you're already using. This thing which every one swears is an absolute game changer, this thing that people claim will jump you into the 21st century* , this thing that everyone around the world swears you need."
Okay it's not a gun to their head but it certainly feels more than a hair coercive.
*people being varying levels of racist/ignorant in believing that "the 21st century" is not a date on a calendar but instead a particular sort of culture.
It's very damaging to trade with the developing world if we start accusing companies of "attempting to colonize" because they have the temerity to expect people granted subsidised access to their website to actually play by the same rules as everyone else. I mean, if we start assuming that Angolans can't or shouldn't abide by the same rules as everyone else, it's very easy to just ensure services aren't affordable to the average Angolan again.
Angolans might have more reason to avoid paying for content than the rest of the world and they might have more reason to use Wikipedia or Facebook as a vector for delivering pirated content than the rest of the world, but the people pirating the content in this manner are at least as aware and deliberate in their circumvention of rules as crackers in other countries, and they should be respected for their clever hacks and blocked from uploading just like crackers elsewhere, and not patronised as people who couldn't possibly be expected to understand or accept Western mores.
Are you seriously arguing the Wikimedia Foundation's intentions can't possibly be benevolent because they won't let Angolans turn their server space into a repository of pirated content?
Actually, your "everyone else" who play by the Western rules, is probably less than half of the world population.
If the only internet I had was that, and I had no way to start my own internet sites either, I'm sure I'd be trying to find ways to use them for what I wanted regardless of their rules too. As it is, I've got the whole internet and have no reason to try and abuse facebook or wikipedia that way.
Well, I do have a wiki farm now, so I feel compelled to reply. Yes, I would have the same relativistic sentiments. I would just impose the banhammer nonetheless.
That's kind of the thing about the DMCA -- it turns us all into enforcement agents. It doesn't really matter how I feel about the rules, because if I don't follow them I get shut down.
How I feel about the core of the issue is that copyrights and patents are imperialism. Imperialism in every culture. The poor and middle class can't afford to enforce their own copyrights, and the are subject to the whim of the the rich. They've created a place where the only culture of the past available is the one they want to sell. Only a few organizations like the EFF stand in the way of this madness, but the IP system is madness anyway.
I have an uncle who served as US Border Patrol for 20 years. He never believed that all of the illegals need to go back, but it's a job. Someone needs to watch the border and deal with problems or it would be complete anarchy. You can have valid reasons for enforcing rules you don't entirely believe in.
So I'll follow the DMCA because I'm the little guy. And I'll do nothing about the IP laywer who I believe has infringed about a hundred of my own copyrights and has acknowledged and then took no action a DMCA takedown notice from me. Because I cannot afford to go against him in a rigged system. And I understand why Angolans want to work against a system that's rigged against the them.
HOWEVER, you can survive if you can't pirate and edit wikipedia at the same time.
You can use wikipedia for free, and express yourself better, within wikipedia rules. Same for all of us. That's a pure bonus (that some poor people I know here would like to have for education btw).
How does that prevent you from having a better internet ? Because you're too poor as a country ? Well preventing to have Free wikipedia will not solve that. having a free wikipedia will 1) show you the greatness of internet even if limited, 2) make you more educated so potentially richer so potentially with more disposable income to afford full internet. Then you can't say well, it discourages you from getting anything other than wikipedia because it's good enough AND you're missing an important part of internet which is pirating US movies (which are much more invasive worldwide).
I don't see many differences between this situation and the one in the west ~10/15 years ago without torrents sites, and barely a few sites available for free if you used the free AOL 50hour CDs, trying to pirate photoshop with disks.
We managed to survive and grow internet also.
Of course, Facebook offering is entirely different.
Offering free internet for the whole earth would be nice. It's not a requirement however.
Is the thrust of your argument that Angolans should be deprived of knowledge and data because they didn't ask for it, or that Wikipedia admins should only be allowed to block and unblock people from the same culture as them?
I mean, Angola has had copyright laws for a while now: the idea that the people behind these hacks are noble savages whose fragile culture is imperilled by Wikipedia admins is really insulting and patronising.
If that's your approach then you don't understand the main value proposition of the web.
These programs are silly and ineffective. Facebook and Wikipedia should just channel their funds to a join effort at making all of the Internet accessible.
We've been down this road before, it didn't work for AOL, why keep trying it?
But this is surely not what the article meant by "digital colonialism", so your question remains unanswered.
IMO the real losers are facebook competitors.
The British sold cloth in India at lower prices, undoubtedly providing many people with cloth they could not otherwise afford, and destroying India's textile industry making India dependent on buying British cloth.
Oh, they also insisted upon opium (that China could not otherwise afford?) being legal in China, when China wanted to prohibit it, and fought a war over it, because they wanted to sell opium in China.
Any walled-garden slice of the net – 'zero rating', 'free basics', etc – hints to people how much more is out there, whetting their appetites.
Given human creativity and plummeting networking-technology costs, people will figure out how to get the full boat, soon enough, by legal or underground methods. Business-model or cost-based barriers to the flow of digital information decay very quickly. And in practice, even these much-hated 'tiered'/subsidized programs mainly accelerate the discovery and deployment of work-arounds.
(Where limits persist, look for police or soldiers, using violence/imprisonment to enforce political edicts.)
So the question I posit is this: Does an inability to acquire something legally, for whatever reason, justify stealing it and if so where do we draw the next line?
i.e., 'You kidnapped and enslaved our people, colonized our country, financed and supported a brutal civil war that caused over 500,000 deaths - and now you say we should worry about your intellectual property?'
"The key market strategy of the Chinese companies seems to be their competitive pricing, tailor-made for cash-stricken African countries."
"Huawei’s former head of operations in West Africa, Wilson Yang, quoted in a case study on the company by the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School in 2009, says that Huawei manages to achieve tremendous margins while still pricing itself only 5 to 15 per cent lower than its major international competitors, Ericsson and Nokia. ZTE prices 30 to 40 per cent below European competitors."
http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-kindle-update-march-22/
But yeah, they should have let us known beforehand. I only read an article about it by accident.
This was posted to HN some time ago and I bought a (paper) copy. Looks like a new example for the authors to add to any second edition they decide to produce.
IMHO, A good President would tell our trade reps to keep one eye closed on this matter and perhaps consider compensating American companies that "illegally" get their arts and entertainment smuggled into difficult countries such as Iran, North Korea, and friendly nations in Africa like Angola!
In another third world country, things are more sophisticated thanks to the wide availability of cheap Android phones. In offices on Friday evenings, everyone swaps movies on SD cards so that they can watch them on the weekend on the phone itself.
Pretty sure, with gifs and zip you can just combine them together with one append command and you are done.
+-----------+-------------+
| extractor | zip archive |
+-----------+-------------+
So you could append the ZIP archive to an image file and then decompress the result without having to remove the image beforehand.
But you cannot concatenate several ZIP archives and expect a working bigger archive.
[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:St...
[1]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-March...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Sidenote: Wikipedia and commons already have a concept of "patrolling", which puts up every new article or file to be patrolled by another editor for spam/copyright violations. That's likely how these bad uploads were caught. Unfortunately this doesn't stop the upload in the first place and requires work to look at and delete the files which is hard to keep up with. (Not to mention that not enough people patrol pages either. On the English Wikipedia, nearly every page I've had patrolled was by one user called SisterTwister. I was also given autopatrolled rights on commons even though I'm hardly a prolific uploader)
Lax implies that there is some kind of objective ranking system. It would be better to simply say that Angola's law allows some practices that, say, the US' law does not.
I'm sure breaking and stealing cars is a valuable skill for an activist in the US.
> Are reposts ok?
> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
In other threads, the mods explained that the dupe detector is weaker than expected on purpose so good stories get a second (and third, ...) chance to get popular. Sometimes the first submission don't get attention by bad luck (wrong time, another submission was too popular, random, ...). So it's common to see that the second or third resubmission gets to the front page.
BTW, Gus, at least some of the time I've been trying to use your preferred "Previous" format with points, days, and comment count when it seem relevant and useful (i.e. when it won't be killed as a dupe). You suggested it in a comment a few days or weeks ago. It's more work, but I'd bet it's more helpful, especially for new users. Most of the time, adding dupe links is simple and should happen quickly since it prevents split discussions and manual merges.