Piracy-as-Infrastructure: Access, preservation, and resistance in a post-ownership world

As digital media shifted from owned objects to licensed services, the Doctrine of Exhaustion (or First Sale Doctrine) became unenforceable in practice. Libraries were replaced by platforms, preservation by authentication, and custody by EULA. At the same time, platform enshitification hollowed out search, archives, and scholarly access, while exploitative academic publishing converted publicly funded research into gated commodities.

This presentation argues that piracy has changed character. It is no longer primarily a distribution shortcut - it has become a parallel knowledge infrastructure.

There is discussion on how centralised platforms create single points of failure for culture, how publishers are killing traditional libraries, how corporations ignore copyright at scale to train AI systems that privatise public knowledge, and how generative AI is actively poisoning the open web with synthetic content, breaking the assumptions search, citation, and preservation depend on.

Against this backdrop, shadow libraries, dark archives, and underground mirrors increasingly outperform official institutions on the metrics that matter to information security: availability, integrity, resilience, and continuity. These systems preserve originals, resist takedowns, maintain provenance, and provide human-curated works in an increasingly adversarial information environment.

Rather than treating modern piracy as a moral failure, this presentation reframes it as an emergent response to institutional and information collapse - a form of fault-tolerant infrastructure that arose because official and legal systems abandoned stewardship.

Finally, there is discussion on what would be required to make piracy unnecessary again: real digital ownership, public preservation mandates, creator-first compensation models, and AI governance.

The goal is not to romanticise or endorse piracy, but to use it as a diagnostic: a signal of where our knowledge systems have failed, and what properties any legitimate successor must restore.