Code Swaraj
The publishers were not amused and have gone after Alexandra with the full fury of executives defending excessive perquisites and ill-gotten gains. Publishers deserve recompense, but inappropriate copyright assertions and other legal shenanigans have made their current moral posture very dubious. They sued her in New York and got a default judgement for millions of dollars and have obtained court orders against her to try and remove domain names, Internet service, and the like. Additional suits are pending.
I've never met Alexandra. I have some friends who know her, but we've never communicated. I saw her interviewed on YouTube once. She seemed very poised, and also very young. And also very brave.
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In April, I came into eight disk drives, each with eight terabytes capacity. On the disks was all human knowledge, or at least a substantial part thereof, a significant chunk of Sci-Hub. I moved the data onto two disk arrays. Each disk array had eight drives and was set up so I could lose two drives on the array and still not lose any data. This process took a couple of months. I spent another couple of months examining the data. I then moved the arrays out of my office to another location.
My purpose in examining this data was initially for the works of government project. I was using the database for a transformational purpose: examining it to determine if articles were in fact in the public domain and perhaps extracting those components that were in the public domain for broader dissemination.
It also seemed important to me that people stand up and support what they believe in. So, I went on Twitter and told the world what I had done and why I was doing it. The words needed to be said. I have attached those tweets as an appendix in this book.
I had promised myself I would write up our works of government research results in December, but I didn’t. Instead, I worked on Gandhi scans and thought about a term that had been rattling around my head for several years.
That term was “Code Swaraj.” How I got to that term was a long and winding path, and the beginning of that road was spent in the swamplands of Washington, D.C.. I’ve spent four stints in Washington, D.C. totaling 15 years. I love the city, but am always glad when I can escape. In 2007, I had just escaped again.
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