The Morality of Piracy in Academia

Institutional injustice explains academic piracy but does not absolve it. Piracy through shadow libraries remains wrong even where it is the lesser evil, and the greater evil is an arrangement in which those who write and those who read must both break the law for knowledge to reach its end. The historical university and the moral institutions that once governed the circulation of knowledge show that this impasse is neither inevitable nor adequately explained by the current political binary. Technology and piracy are compensations that allow society to live with the institution’s failure instead of repairing it. The pirate who justifies himself, relieving the institution’s failure while enlarging its prestige, becomes its Shadow Client, and I propose what remains to him is confession.