…and I support steppe pirates.

What started as minor annoy­ance that I couldn’t pur­chase ebooks legally, has become a deter­mi­na­tion to sup­port pirates. Publishers, there are 6,973,738,433 peo­ple in the world, and you sell legally to only 5% of them? You’re screw­ing your own future here!

I’ve repeat­edly run across these notices while search­ing for edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als for myself and my students:

This is incred­i­bly jar­ring. Last year I went to Texas A&M Uni­ver­sity for free, where I got any book in Amer­ica deliv­ered to my hands in two weeks, com­pletely free.

And now I find myself in Kaza­khstan, sur­rounded by insight­ful schol­ars and stu­dents who are barred from prac­ti­cal access to work mate­ri­als. Barred by “this is not avail­able in your coun­try” and “this resource is for US/UK/EU res­i­dents only.” (Or, “this resource costs two months’ salary, but we don’t really care about you.” Or, “you could get this if you went to Amer­ica for dupli­cate school­ing, but that would cost your par­ents their house.”)

Because of this expe­ri­ence, I fully sup­port the Indian/Chinese/Brazilian/Kazakhstani schol­ars and stu­dents who “pirate” phi­los­o­phy, soci­ol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, and physics text­books. If those resources are avail­able to first-world schol­ars for free, they should be avail­able and afford­able for us all.

I’m reminded again that I was awarded the “birthright lot­tery” of Amer­i­can cit­i­zen­ship, giv­ing me twice the wages, twice the pro­tec­tions, and twice the future oppor­tu­ni­ties of my Kaza­khstani equals. Not based on my mer­its, but based on dis­crim­i­na­tion, on the haves– and have-nots of mod­ern nation-states.

And I can’t believe that com­pa­nies and non­prof­its world­wide choose to for­bit access and pur­chase from peo­ple liv­ing in devel­op­ing coun­tries, and yet say with a straight face that their mis­sion is to act with some ben­e­fit to the world. Or that some­day later (10 years from now? 20 years from now?), they might decide to sign agree­ments to allow sale or use of their prod­uct across vast swaths of Eura­sia… if they feel like it.

Why, when a world of wis­dom, edu­ca­tional tech­nolo­gies, and the best libraries in his­tory are increas­ingly online world­wide, is access still closed in so many ways to schol­ars and stu­dents in the devel­op­ing world?

And why do Cen­tral Asian coun­tries sign anti-piracy agree­ments with­out first demand­ing a clause rec­og­niz­ing that it can hardly be piracy (i.e. loss of income) if mate­ri­als were never made avail­able for sale to their cit­i­zens, anyway?