Libri, 2007, vol. 57, pp. 165–178
Printed in Germany All rights reserved
Copyright Saur 2007
Libri
ISSN 0024-2667
Downloading Communism:
File Sharing as Samizdat in Ukraine
MARIA HAIGH
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.
This article explores the cultural meanings of file sharing and
other forms of digital media piracy in Ukraine. Ukraine, the
second most populous of the former Soviet republics, had
been named as one of the ten ”priority countries” with ”unacceptable piracy rates”. Western governments and commercial associations have lobbied intensively to present piracy
in straightforward terms as a crime. In contrast, the author
argues that file-sharing practices in Ukraine reflect distinctive
features of its cultural heritage. Two factors are particularly
important here: the Soviet Union’s disregard for international
copyright norms and the cultural tradition of Samizdat that
arose as a form of cultural resistance to the state’s monopoly
on conventional reproductive methods. Samizdat was closely
tied to the emergence of a modern Ukrainian national identi-
ty. An analysis of current Ukrainian attitudes toward piracy,
focused on users of the popular Muzon.com music-sharing
site, shows that these factors influence attitudes toward the
legitimacy of international copyright measures. Many Ukrainians distrust the imposition of controls on reproduction of
information and resent the coercive tactics used against local
pirate producers on behalf of Western copyright holders. Parallels between file sharing and Samizdat are particularly instructive because both take place from one individual to another along an anonymous chain, across national boundaries
and without the control of copyright holders. In both cases,
the political meaning of the action comes from participation
in the process itself, as much as from the material being
shared.
Introduction
Figure 1. Celebrated Modernhumorist.com cartoon “Downloading Communism”
In 2000, just as the Napster service was adding
file sharing to email and Web browsing as one
of the main uses of Internet bandwidth, a poster
appeared (see Figure 1). It was created by online
magazine Modern Humorist (Colton & Aboud
2000), but like so many other pieces of Internet
folk culture, its origins were quickly obscured as
it spread from one person to another: transmitted
in messages sent to friends and co-workers, linked
to in blogs and printed out for ironic display on
office doors of hip professors and the cubicles of
systems administrators.
”When you pirate MP3s you’re downloading
Communism,” warns the poster, over a 1940s style
propaganda image depicting a satanic figure sporting a Leninesque goatee and Soviet lapels. This
fiend stares over the shoulder of an oblivious
computer user, watching the screen of his Apple
iMac with interest. The poster pastiches the imagery and message of Second World War classics
in which caricatures of enemy leaders are shown
rejoicing as foolish citizens fail to eat less food,
preserve secrecy or carpool (”When you ride alone
Maria Haigh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Information Studies, 3210 N. Maryland Ave, Bolton Hall, Rm. 568,
Milwaukee, WI 53211. Tel. 1-414-229-5397. E-mail: mhaigh@uwm.edu. Web: http://www.tomandmaria.com/maria/
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Maria Haigh
you ride with Hitler! Join a car-sharing club today!”) (Pursell 1943; Huang 2005). The satirical
pay-off comes at the bottom of the poster, with
the text ”A reminder from the Recording Industry
Association of America.” The poster resonated so
widely because it lumped the RIAA, then making
headlines with an ultimately successful campaign
to sue Napster out of existence (BBC News 2000)
with the absurdly outdated imagery of the Soviet
Union and the crude anti-communist propaganda
of the early Cold War. It also parodied earlier poster campaigns carried out on behalf of copyright
enforcement, such as the British Phonographic
Industry’s much-ridiculed campaign of the early
1980s ”Home Taping is Killing Music… And It’s Illegal.” The satirical poster implied that the RIAA’s
attempts to stamp out file sharing were as alarmist
and futile as these earlier campaigns against communists and tape recorders. So well produced was
it that many questions were posted online by those
who had come across it and wondered whether
it was a genuine RIAA production. (A published
article by an author identified as ”Senior Legal Officer, Australian Copyright Council” cited the poster approvingly, albeit with a caveat that it was
”uncertain” whether it was really produced by
the RIAA (McDonald 2001).
To the young creators of the poster, and its Napster-loving American viewers, Communism was
safely distant and full of period charm: a long-since
vanquished, absurdly kitschy, and ultimately ineffectual enemy. Yet the use of file sharing software spans many different cultures. As I pursued
my own research on the use of file sharing technology in Ukraine, a former Soviet Republic, I
started to wonder what the experience of seventy
years of Soviet rule had done to shape Ukrainian
thinking on the issue of ”downloading communism.” I began to realize that Ukrainian users had
a quite different sense than their American comrades of the copyright issues involved, the relevance of communism to file sharing and indeed
the cultural meaning of file sharing technology
within Ukrainian society.
These, I argue, can only be understood through
reference to their diverging historical experiences.
Analysis of the discussion of copyright, piracy and
Internet file sharing in the Ukrainian press and
within the Ukrainian community website Muzon.
com demonstrates that local attitudes and practices have been shaped profoundly by the Soviet
166
experience. Today’s intellectual property environment reflects both the Soviet culture’s lack of concern for the rights of individuals, businesses and
foreign governments and the struggle of opposition and nationalist groups to freely distribute
material outside the control of Soviet authorities.
These two factors, while in many ways opposed,
both influence Ukrainians to reject constraints on
the free distribution of copyrighted materials. In
addition, the efforts of Western businesses and
governments to enforce their own copyright regimes on Ukraine trigger resentment in a nation
that long suffered under the dictates of the Kremlin. I show a number of technical and cultural
similarities between the practices of Internet file
sharing and those of Soviet Samizdat, which I argue lead some Ukrainians to interpret the struggle
against Western copyright as the expression of
political freedom and national identity.
Users, information and copyright
Little or no previously published work has examined user perspectives on file sharing and copyright issues in Ukraine or other post-Soviet countries. A thriving body of literature examines the
technologies of peer-to-peer file sharing (Oram
2001; Gummadi et al. 2003; Androutsellis-Theotokis & Spinellis 2004; Dumitriu et al. 2005), its usage patterns in Western countries, and its economic impact on the recording industry (Raini &
Maddene 2004; Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf 2005;
Zentner 2006). Several authors have addressed
cultural aspects of peer-to-peer from an end-user
perspective in the United States (Agre 2003; Gal,
Singer & Popkin 2003; Loo 2003; Andrade et al.
2005). While Ukraine occasionally appears as one
country among many when international statistics
are presented in economic work, no previous author has examined the cultural or social context of
peer-to-peer usage there. Indeed, little scholarly
attention has been paid to any aspect of the development of copyright and intellectual property regimes within Ukraine and other Soviet countries;
existing work (Shylyuk 2002; Motsnyi 2004; Pilch
2004) focus on legal measures rather than actual
practices or cultural beliefs. Existing research has
shown that other developing countries differ from
the Western world in their perception of commercialization of intellectual property (Britz & Lipinski 2001). The Western copyright system evolved
Downloading Communism
over three centuries as a means to maximize the
public good by providing an incentive to create
new cultural works with a temporary monopoly
on their reproduction and sale (Mann 1998). Even
in the Western context, the copyright regime has
been criticized as warped by the interests of a
handful of large corporations (Lessig 2004) and as
a tool of capitalist ideology (Richards 2004).
An enormous body of work has demonstrated
the importance of understanding users when
studying the social roles of technological systems.
In recent years, sociologists and historians of technology have been paying ever-greater attention
to the role of users in shaping the effectiveness,
social function and cultural meaning of technologies. For a long time, research into technological
change focused on the creation of new inventions,
which in turn was often supposed to occur as a
result of the application of advances in pure science (the so-called ”linear model”) (Grandin et al.
2004). Attention has increasingly shifted toward
the broader concept of an ”innovation process,”
in which the act of invention is only part of a
much broader set of activities needed to create a
successful and widely used new product (Rogers
1995). Yet scholars in many fields have increasingly shifted away from the roles of the creators
and packagers of technologies altogether, to focus
instead on the roles of users. Much has been written on the creative reuse or ”sampling” of sounds
and images to create new ”mash-up” works (Lessig 2001). In the same way, scholars have argued
that user communities often find applications for
technologies quite different from those intended
by their original creators. Even the Model-T Ford,
that emblem of mass-produced homogeneity, was
extensively customized by its owners (Franz 2005).
An ethnographic study of home computer use
found that different families incorporated them into their daily lives in very different ways (Lally
2002). Users play a crucial part in shaping technologies, and determining what is sometimes called
their impact on society. As Nelly Oudshoorn and
Trevor Pinch (2003, 2-3) wrote in the ”Introduction” to their recent volume How Users Matter, ”In
addition to studying what users do with technology, we are interested in what technologies do to
users ... . Users and technology are seen as two
sides of the same problem – as coconstructed.”
File sharing is a new technology, and the dominant systems and networks continue to evolve rap-
idly (in part because of the legal efforts by RIAA
and others to outlaw popular programs). Its use,
and indeed its existence, remains controversial
and organizations such as RIAA, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the
International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers (IFPI) have waged expensive campaigns to convince potential users that using file
sharing networks to exchange copyrighted materials is both dangerous (since one might be sued
for millions of dollars), illegal (since file sharing
is stealing) and morally indefensible (since file
sharing takes bread from the mouths of starving
recording artists). While these groups continue to
pursue legal actions against file sharing (Associated Press (AP) 2003; Borland 2004), and technological (Kumar et al. 2006; Liang et al. 2006), their
public campaigns recognize the crucial role of user
attitudes and practices in determining the future
development of file sharing. Sociologists of technology have argued that social construction is
particularly important in the early years of a new
technology, before a social and technical ”closure”
is reached around a particular taken-for-granted
version of what a technology does, who it is for,
and how it should be used (Pinch & Bijker 1987).
Intellectual property in Ukrainian culture
While Internet file sharing is still a relatively new
and uncommon activity in Ukraine, its patterns of
use rest on the nation’s existing intellectual property regime and cultural infrastructure. Ukraine,
the second most populous of the former Soviet
republics, had been named by the IFPI as one of
the ten ”priority countries” with ”unacceptable
piracy rates” (IFPI 2005). Kyiv, its capital, is notorious as a center for piracy. Copied CDs and DVDs
are sold openly by street traders, most notably at
the famous Petrovka Market where more than
300 stalls are estimated to do business (IFPI 2006).
Many of the disks sold in Ukraine are reported to
have been mass produced in well-equipped factories, whose owners served as a powerful political
lobby in the murky world of Ukrainian politics.
IFPI estimates that these plants have an annual
capacity for more than 100 million units, and that
more than 80% of the music disks purchased in
Ukraine are illicit (IFPI 2005).
Many Ukrainians do not share the Western legal concept of intellectual property as an analog of
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Maria Haigh
Figure 2. Book covers from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and The Wizard of the Emerald City by Aleksander Volkov.
physical property and unauthorized reproduction
as an analog of theft. This can be traced back to
Ukraine’s experience as part of the Soviet Union.
The USSR did not recognize the concept of intellectual property, particularly as it related to foreign and scientific works. As one observer of the
1970s noted,
The Soviet Union consistently has been one of the largest
producers of translations in the world. The most important
was the principal of ”freedom of translation”. In the period
1946–1970, Soviet Publishers produced 26,737 different
works by foreign authors, with a total circulation of
1,088,295,000 copies. The USSR well deserved the title of
‘the world’s most active literary pirate’ … until 1967 the
USSR refused to establish copyright relations with any
foreign countries. (Newcity 1978, 33)
A particularly dramatic application of the ”freedom of translation” principle was provided by
”The Wizard of the Emerald City,” a hugely popular story by Russian writer and metallurgy professor Aleksander Volkov (see Figure 2). Published in
Russian in 1939, it told of a little girl from Kansas
who was transported by a tornado with her dog
Totoshka on a trip to visit a wizard. Even today,
few in the former Soviet Union realize the work is
a translation from Frank Baum’s celebrated original. As Anne Nesbet (2001) wrote, ”One of the under-appreciated ironies of the Cold War is that the
imaginations of Soviet children were nourished
by the same fairytale loved in the United States ...”
Volkov changed very little in his 1939 edition of
”Volshebnik.” Though as Nesbet notes: ”Volkov’s
wizard is a decidedly more expert balloonist than
Baum’s: his balloon uses hydrogen rather than
168
mere hot air, and he even assures Elli (renamed
Dorothy) that he will be able to find a supply of hydrogen in fairyland.” This reflected Soviet efforts
to publicize national expertise in aviation. However, despite such innovations, ”only fifteen pages
of Volkov’s 1939 Volshebnik contain entirely new
material ...” (Nesbet 2001). Volkov wrote several sequels and his book was translated into thirteen languages and sold throughout the socialist
block.
In 1973 the Soviet Union announced that it was
joining the Universal Copyright Convention,
though critics suggested this was motivated not by
a newfound interest in paying royalties, but rather
stemmed from an interest in suppressing the foreign publication of works by Soviet dissidents
(Taylor 1973; Newcity 1978).
Since achieving independence in 1991, Ukraine
has moved to bring its legal code into line with
Western copyright provisions. These reforms
granted protection for the first time to foreign
sound recordings, and added protection for published works created prior to the Soviet Union’s
acceptance of the Universal Copyright Convention. In 1993, shortly after independence, Ukrainian legislature enacted a new law on copyright
and intellectual property. Further laws and decrees followed, including the Copyright Act of
2001, which revised the former Copyright Law of
1993. Ukraine acceded to the Geneva Phonograms
Convention in 2000, and to the WIPO Copyright
Treaty in 2002 (Pastukhov 2002).
However, critics complained that these provisions were poorly thought out and lacked vital
tools necessary to their enforcement. A 2003 re-
Downloading Communism
port from the International Intellectual Property
Alliance (IIPA) concluded that, ”the history of
copyright enforcement in Ukraine the past few
years has consisted of a series of missteps, undercutting effective enforcement” (IIPA 2003). Ukrainian requirements blocked the import of authorized disks while doing little to slow domestic
piracy. The producers and sellers of pirated materials have rarely been prosecuted, and customs
authorities did little to stem the flow of pirated
materials across the borders. These actions have
been attributed to the corrupt and inefficient
nature of the Ukrainian government in general,
and to the success of pirate producers in lobbying politicians and judges (Aslund 1998; Tannock
2002; Warner 2005). However, this also reflects
Ukraine’s Soviet legacy (Kaminski & Kaminski
2001). A report (Boulware 2002) in Wired Magazine
suggested that, ”the judges themselves don’t view
intellectual property theft as a crime.” Given the
many pressing problems faced by Ukraine, few
citizens would have identified music piracy as a
priority for law enforcement agencies.
Intellectual property and
Ukrainian nationalism
Pressure on the Ukrainian government to eliminate commercial piracy has been coming almost
entirely from foreign governments and powerful
international lobbying groups such as the IIPA
(International Intellectual Property Alliance), an
umbrella coalition representing numerous U.S.
trade associations), WIPO (The World Intellectual
Property Organization, a specialized agency of
the United Nations), the BSA (Business Software
Alliance, representing the interests of the world’s
commercial software industry) and IFPI (The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a federation made up of various national
recording industry associations).
These industrial and governmental bodies present piracy in straightforward terms as a crime,
and emphasize links between music piracy and
violent organized crime. The international struggle against piracy is seen as a straightforward
matter of building a strong legal framework in
developing countries and then making sure that
local authorities enforce these laws. They assume
that national development follows linear path
from the lawless frontier of unchecked piracy to
the well-policed copyright regime evidenced in
the United States (IFPI 2005). Their main leverage
has come from Ukraine’s desire to trade freely
with the West. The initial push to enact IP protections in 1993 came from negotiations with the U.S.
to receive trade benefits. At this time the United
States offered low-tariff trade to countries granted
what was known, under the rules of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, as ”most favored
nation” status. (This status has been renamed to
”Normal Trade Relations”). The Jackson-Vanik
Amendment of 1974 had barred the Soviet Union
from receiving most favored nation status, but its
successor states were keen to normalize their trade
relations with the U.S. Achieving and maintaining
this status requires approval of the U.S. President
and Congress, and during the 1990s American
politicians often push to deny it to countries that
committed human rights violations or flout the
rules of international trade. After independence,
Ukraine began receiving annual exemptions
from the amendment’s provisions. More recently,
Ukraine has been negotiating to join the World
Trade Organization, a process requiring the consent of existing member nations and a protracted
series of negotiations. (Bihun 2006; Bodoni 2006)
The United States has not been shy in wielding
its trading power in defense of the intellectual
property interests of its music and movie companies. Trade benefits granted after independence
were contingent on Ukraine’s adherence to intellectual property measures, and the International
Intellectual Property Alliance lobbied Congress
with the message that Ukraine was not living up
to its side of the bargain. In 2001 the United States
suspended Ukraine’s duty-free access to U.S.
markets and imposed $75 million dollars of trade
sanctions in response to the rampant pirating of
optical media products (Boyarski et al. 2001; IIPA
2001). This dramatic action produced some results in Ukraine, including a new 2005 law aimed
specifically at optical disk piracy and a number
of raids on pirate factories and warehouses. The
threshold for criminal activity was lowered 150
times to 3000 hryvnias ($600) (Peretyatko 2005).
In exchange for these measures the United States
lifted its sanctions on Ukrainian exports (Nynka
2005). In 2006 Congress voted to permanently end
the Jackson-Vanik restrictions on Ukraine, and
the U.S. agreed to support Ukraine’s bid for WTO
membership (Gentzel 2005; IFPI 2006).
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Maria Haigh
For many Ukrainians, however, the heavy
handed efforts of powerful foreign powers to rewrite Ukraine’s laws according to their own models seemed an unwelcome echo of a long history
of foreign domination. Ukrainian national pride
tends to focus on the so-called Golden Age of
Kyiv during the tenth and eleventh centuries and
on a period of semi-autonomous Cossack rule
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
From a nationalist viewpoint, however, the bulk
of Ukraine’s history been a sad story of partition
between successive regional powers, followed by
ever-closer integration into the Russian Empire.
Ukraine enjoyed short period of independence
from 1917 to 1921, when the Soviet forces crushed
Ukrainian army and Ukraine was absorbed in the
Soviet Union. During the last decades of Czarist
rule the Ukrainian language and cultural identity
had been harshly suppressed, and efforts were
stepped up further during Soviet times. In 1932–
1933 more than 7 million people perished of starvation as a result of disastrous agricultural policies Stalin introduced specifically to depopulate
the Ukrainian heartland (Conquest 1986; Subtelny 2000). As Russification continued after World
War II, by the early 1980s it seemed that Ukraine’s
fate was inextricably tied to Russia. But in 1988,
during the Perestroika years, writers and intellectuals set up Ukrainian People’s Movement of Restructuring (Rukh), beginning the public revival
of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1991, Ukrainian independence took place as a by-product of the implosion of the Soviet Union, and came as something of a surprise to all concerned (Wilson 2002).
Unsurprisingly, Ukraine’s national identity is
still rather fragile, and relies on the active promotion of Ukrainian language, establishment of a pantheon of national heroes, and the celebration of
liberation from hundreds of years of foreign rule.
While Ukrainian nationalist sentiment is, almost
by definition, anti-Russian, it does not follow that
it is always pro-Western. The United States too
can be seen as an alien power intent on imposing
its own values and culture on the world. As small
local businesses, pirates like to appeal to Ukrainian pride in their struggle against foreign copyright holders. One journalist wrote: ”… As for
‘authorship rights,’ pirates categorically refuse to
seriously acknowledge their significance at all … .
For instance, one of the young entrepreneurs I got
to know, declared that unlicensed software and
170
music tracks belong to the whole of humanity and
that he, as a ‘true Soviet person’, does not want
to recognize vile capitalist copyrights. ... Western
legislations, with their ‘protection of intellectual
property,’ protect interests of corporate monopolies, American capital, and all those dark forces,
that they call… ‘globalism’!” (Lykhovod 2001).
While campaigns against piracy often rest on the
idea that copying will deprive artists of the livelihood, publishing in the USSR was never market
driven. A system of royalty payments and copyrights was established under Soviet law, but the
idea that artists made a living through the sale of
their work was not a part of Soviet culture. Artists
and writers were supported by the state and, in
return for furthering its ideological agenda, were
granted salaries, apartments and the other essentials of life (Newcity 1978; Swanson 1984; Garrison & Gans 1994).
As citizens of one of the poorest European countries (GDP $1,773 per capita) (The Economist Intelligence Unit 2006) most Ukrainians are unable or
unwilling to pay for legitimate copies of computer
software, music, and movies. According to one
opinion column published in the Kyiv Telegraph,
software piracy can be justified morally because
Western countries offshore software production
to low-cost countries, but then charge prices that
their own overseas contractors cannot afford to
pay. Software pirates are restoring justice by making software available to the developing countries
by the prices they can afford (Zcvkhediani 2004).
File sharing in Ukraine
In recent years, the focus of international intellectual property enforcement has turned toward illicit Internet distribution of music, movies and
software, particularly via peer-to-peer file sharing
systems. By the end of the 1990s the recorded music industry saw these systems as a major threat
to its existing business model. The RIAA successfully closed down Napster, the first widely used
file-sharing service (Evangelista & Egelko 2001).
Newer file sharing services and networks, including Kazaa, BitTorrent, and Gnutella, have been
harder for the industry to shut down (Ahrens
2003). Meanwhile, improvements to software and
the widespread availability of high-bandwidth
residential connections in many Western and
Asian countries has made it increasingly practical
Downloading Communism
to share large movie and computer program files
as well as musical recordings (Wang 2003).
But while Ukrainian peer-to-peer file sharing users are engaged with the same software and connected to the same global networks as their western counterparts their use of the technology and
its social meaning are quite different. To some extent this is a simple result of economics. File sharing works very slowly over a dialup connection,
and so its initial core user group in the West consisted of college students with high bandwidth
access to the Internet via campus networks. Only
later, with the spread of high bandwidth home
connections, did it become possible to download
very large files from home. The Internet came later
to Ukraine than to western counties, and is still far
less prevalent there. Internet access is readily
available, with more than 270 Internet Service Providers (ISP) doing business. Broadband service is
readily available in much of Kyiv, with packages
priced at around $20 a month. But with an annual
per capita income of just $1,200 {The Economist Intelligence Unit 2006, #1678} such services remain
out of reach of most Ukrainians. Neilsen//Net
Ratings (2006) estimates that more than five million Ukrainians are regular Internet users, representing just 11.4% of the population. This is significantly below the global average of 16.7% and
well below the 51.9% penetration in the European
Union (Nielsen//NetRatings 2006).
Because high-quality, low-cost pirated music
and film disks are readily available in Ukraine
while high-bandwidth Internet connections remain scarce, peer-to-peer file sharing fills a different niche here than in Western countries. For
one thing, a downloaded file is more likely to
substitute for purchase of an illicit physical copy
than a legal one, simply because the majority of
Ukraine’s film, music and software sales are made
by pirates. It follows that any loss of revenue
would be felt by pirates rather than legitimate producers of music and video recordings, particularly since price-sensitive consumers are unlikely to
be considering the purchase of an official disk in
the first place.
But while file sharing has yet to enter the
Ukrainian mainstream, an enthusiastic and rapidly growing community of Internet users has
adopted Web and peer-to-peer technologies to
share music and video files. I have been observing
the activities of this community through one of its
online hubs, Muzon.com. This is a popular subscription-based Ukrainian language website with
close to seven thousand registered users. Visitors
discuss political, cultural, social issues, download
songs, and view programs from Ukrainian television. Discussion forums host debates on piracy,
music file sharing, and the development of the
Ukrainian music. Like many community-based
websites, anyone is able to view existing discussion items but users must establish a free account
in order to post their own contributions. Because
Ukrainian copyright enforcement remains lax, the
site can offer its own unlicensed download service,
whereby users can listen to low-quality streaming
audio free of charge or pay a small fee to receive a
high quality, downloadable version of a song.
One of the distinctive features of file sharing
networks is their global reach. These systems
build on the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet
itself, in which (firewalls aside) any computer
hooked up to a constituent network can send or
receive data packets to or from any other computer hooked up to a constituent network. While
Western users will generally find communication
with computers in the same city to work faster
and more reliably than those with computers
located in other continents they need take no special steps or pay no special fees to communicate
internationally. Indeed, few users of file sharing
systems know or care where the computers they
are downloading from are located. (The systems
generally just display a numerical IP address,
such as 199.239.137.200. An interested user could
discover what network domain the number is assigned to, and hence what country the machine is
located within, but this makes no difference to the
operation of the file sharing system).
The situation is different in Kyiv. Unlike heat,
gas or water, Internet bandwidth is usually metered in Kyiv. Znet (name changed), one of the
leading ISPs in Kyiv, offers a standard package including just 750MB of international data exchange
and 8GB of data transfer within Ukraine. Once
this limit has been exhausted, downloading a 1GB
compressed movie file from a foreign source via
a peer-to-peer system would cost around $50 –
hardly an economic alternative to a market stall
DVD. Still more alarmingly, uploads requested by
foreign users could add thousands of dollars to
the monthly bill if a program like Kazaa was left
running. Even the $4 to transfer a gigabyte within
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Maria Haigh
Ukraine is a significant sum for most Ukrainians.
But Znet also offers its own site for the exchange
of films, music and software. Users are free to upload their files for others to enjoy. A download of
the same file from Znet’s own server would not
count toward these traffic limits and might take
place much more rapidly over the high-speed local network. Znet’s only acknowledgement of
copyright law appears to be a simple disclaimer
which users must click before accessing the site.
In the West, so-called ”warez” Web and ftp sites
for the exchange of pirated materials usually appear secretly and disappear rapidly once service
providers discover their existence, but such sites
appear to enjoy much longer, happier and more
overt lives in Ukraine. Both Napster’s original
peer-to-peer model and the subsequent refinement of the model by other services to eliminate
the central catalog of available files were inspired
by the need to avoid legal liability for exchange of
copyrighted materials. Downloading from a central server is more convenient and reliable than
peer-to-peer file sharing for many kinds of file
exchange (it is, after all, the model adopted by
iTunes and other commercial sites) so, in the absence of effective legal enforcement, it is not surprising that services such as Muzon and Znet are a
popular alternative to peer-to-peer networks.
File sharing and Samizdat
The social construction of file sharing systems
within Ukraine has been influenced in several
ways by the country’s socialist past. The idea of
”downloading communism” does not appear so
ridiculous to Ukrainians as it might to Westerners,
and neither it is necessarily undesirable to them.
In the former Soviet Union, Communism meant
a future utopian society where everybody would
be free and equal, private property wouldn’t exist, where the ruling economy principle would be:
”For each according to his needs, and from each
according to his ability” (Marx & Engels 1848).
Sergey Rublev of the Russian language online publication Lenta.ru writes: ”File sharing implies ‘communism’ – users allow their own internet channels
and power of their computers to be used for the
benefit of other users” (Rublev 2005). Bauwens
goes further in positioning P2P as a new mode of
property and production (Bauwens 2005). But file
sharing and other forms of piracy in Ukraine can
172
draw upon another powerful cultural tradition:
Samizdat. Soviet authorities maintained a monopoly on the means of mechanical reproduction of
printed and recorded works. Xerox machines were
banned for general use, and Soviet citizens needed
special permission to make any photocopies. The
illicit reproduction of unsanctioned material was
seen as a heroic act of resistance. Manuscripts
were photographed, retyped or copied longhand
and passed from person to person in a practice
known as Samizdat.
The concept of distributing underground literature did not originate in the 20th century Soviet
Empire. For instance, the Russian Decembrist
movement of the 19th century used underground
literature extensively. However, I focus on 20th century Samizdat in the former Soviet Union. Since its
inception in the 20th century, Soviet Samizdat went
through a number of transitions.
Ukraine’s acceptance of the piracy of copyrighted works can be viewed as a continuation of
this Samizdat tradition. Many Ukrainians continue
to associate the unrestricted sharing of media materials with freedom, and attempts to restrict the
technologies of information exchange with Soviet
era repression. This topic receives much debate at
Muzon.com (see URL: http://www.muzon.com
and Figure 3). One user wrote: ”… some [companies] have a KGB grip: they would dig to the last
bone. 70 years of the Soviet Union did not pass
without trace. They will do everything to prosecute, punish, close, fine …” Another user, ”opom,”
added, ”Personally, I am against stealing in all possible forms. However, I am against limiting rights
for information access: in our days, it is the same
as trying to sell air” (Maxym 2006).
It is in the case of peer-to-peer file sharing that
the parallels between Soviet era Samizdat and contemporary Ukrainian practices are most apparent.
One similarity is in the mechanism of transmission: from one individual to another. The Samizdat
distribution mechanism during the Soviet period
very much resembled an anonymous peer-to-peer
network: texts were passed from one reader to another along a chain, without the knowledge or permission of the original author or of any publisher.
One of the most prominent Samizdat periodical
publications Chronicle of current events contained
the following instructions: ”If you have materials
to contribute to the dissident movement pass it to
the person from whom you have received this is-
Downloading Communism
Figure 3. Muzon.com music forum (August 10, 2007).
sue. He or she will pass it to the person from whom
they received the ‘Khronika’. Don’t try to follow
the whole chain yourself” (Daniel 2005). Kathleen
Smith (1996, 74) in her book Remembering Stalin’s
victims explains: ”Constant pressure by the KGB
spurred Khronika to invent a compartmentalized
system of information gathering: a person with a
news item had to pass it to his or her distributor
of the paper, rather than attempt to contact the
editors directly. This system hampered the formation of organizations but limited the damage done
by individual arrests.” Another similarity is that
the political significance of peer-to-peer file sharing and of Samizdat comes as much from the act
of sharing as from the content of the work being
shared. Most often Samizdat is associated with the
underground dissemination of the banned literature regarding human rights abuses in the Soviet
Union during 1960s and 1970s. However the term
”sam-sebya-izdat” (literally translates as ”self-oneself-publish”) was invented in 1940s by a poet Nikolai Glazkov. Glazkov’s poetry and miniature
novels with half absurd content were well known
in Moscow literary circle, but were almost never
published during Glazkov’s life. Glazkov started
creating small typed collections of his own works
on folded sheets, hand-sewed into notebooks and
presented them to his friends (Daniel 2005). This
practice spread as a means for the limited circulation of artistic work. Russian-Jewish dissident writer, Alexander Daniel (2005, 3) wrote in his book
”Sources and Meaning of Soviet Samizdat” that:
At the end of 1950s samizdat becomes not only a channel
for distribution of banned and half-banned texts, but also
an instrument of ”second culture”, a culture that realizes
itself by ignoring the restrictions of state censorship … .
People started to write for samizdat. The manuscripts
had mainly non-political nature. However, the mere fact
of being outside of censorship these texts had an oppositional nature: if not opposition to the government,
then opposition to the established system of prohibitions.
Later, and more explicitly political, work built
on the existing distribution practices. In 1960s the
173
Maria Haigh
circulated texts started focusing mainly on issues
of human rights, current social and political affairs. At the same time, the term sam-sebya-izdat
got abbreviated to sam-izdat (Alekseeva 2005).
But in the Soviet context even the act of distributing poetry outside official channels had been politically charged. As Daniel (2005) pointed out,
”Samizdat is not a text itself, but the way the text
exists. It is a specific way of creating and distributing socially significant texts: the copying of texts
happens without their author’s control. An author
can only ‘launch the text in samizdat’, further distribution is out of his control.”
Likewise, peer-to-peer enthusiasts (in both
Ukraine and the West) often report feeling empowered by the act of sharing itself. They see a
kind of ideological virtue in the free exchange of
materials, whether the materials are copyrighted
or not. In both cases, a statement is being made in
favor of individual empowerment and against the
effective monopoly on cultural exchange held by
established media companies. One user of Muzon.
com equated the unfettered distribution of music
files with political freedom, insisting that, ”pirates
will always exist. If they will cease to exist, I myself will continue distributing CDs for a symbolic
price or for free” (Maxym 2006).
In post-Soviet era, people may also see an echo
between the measures taken by the Soviets to deter the spread of Samizdat and the efforts of Western record companies to target randomly chosen
users of file-sharing software for dramatic punishment. The Soviet regime imposed a standard of
five years in Siberian labor camps and seven years
in exile for writing and distributing Samizdat.
RIAA and IFPI intimidate P2P users with millions
of dollars in fines (P2P Net 2004). Both can be seen
as entrenched regimes fighting against long-term
technological shifts that undermine their fundamental business models.
Samizdat and peer-to-peer networks both provided materials free-of-charge to all users. But at
the same time, both systems were confined in
practice to an educated elite. Samizdat was a grassroots activity, in which ordinary users deployed
new technologies to circumvent the printing monopoly of the state. It started with cheap and accessible technologies for manuscript distribution.
Handwritten manuscripts created with roller pens
and carbon paper yielded three simultaneous copies. Copying with typewriting machines allowed
174
up to 5 copies simultaneously. Another form of
samizdat publications became more popular at
the same time: texts printed on mainframe computer matrix printers. Banned books were stored
on tapes and magnetic disks for mainframes. The
books were printed on peripheral printing devices
that were intended for printing program code. An
underground public library was organized in
Odessa during the 1970s, stocked with films,
photographs and microfilm copies of banned
books published before the revolution of 1917 and
abroad (Daniel 2005).
Such efforts continue to resonate today. Maksim
Moshkov became famous throughout the Russian
language Internet for his enormous online collection of literature from Russian and other former
Soviet nationalities authors (http://www.lib.ru/).
Moshkov admits that his collection is possible to
maintain on the Web because current Russian laws
on intellectual property allow it. However, when
the Russian legislature will be aligned with international standards with more strict regulations
and limitations on information distribution on
the Internet, he foresees his library not disappearing, but rather ”going underground” to the world
of peer-to-peer: ”I personally will be building a
”Samizdat” system … and other rebellious librarians will go underground as well, underground
they feel themselves quite comfortable. There are
number of foreign hosts that will be out of Moscow’s reach. There are P2P networks that are
impossible to control. The whole world has made
this transition already, and we are the only ones
staying visible” (Deynychenko 2006)
Like today’s peer-to-peer networks, Samizdat distribution systems crossed national boundaries and
did not always respect the rights of foreign copyright holders. For instance, the Russian translation
of the Hemingway’s ”For Whom Bell Tolls” was
part of the underground circulation initially before
eventually transferring to a mainstream published
circulation. This transition occurred in the other
direction too: Solzhenitsyn’s stories were banned
and extracted from libraries after their publication by the Soviet state. Homemade copies were
distributed after his books were extracted from libraries, in defiance of Soviet copyright law. By
the end of 1970s, Europe’s Iron Curtain showed
enough signs of dilapidation for ”tamizdat” (there
published) became the most preferred form of underground literature. Eventually, most of the docu-
Downloading Communism
ments circulated in Samizdat were initially published abroad, and distributed internally either
by photographic means or through the traditional
Samizdat mechanisms of hand-written or typed
documents (Alekseeva 2005). Today, file-sharing
networks and websites provide not only a means
for Ukrainians to access foreign music and films
but also a way for first- and second-generation
members of Ukraine’s huge diaspora to remain
immersed in the culture of their homeland.
Within Ukraine, Samizdat was vital to the preservation of nationalist sentiment. Ukrainian cultural works and political documents suppressed
by the authorities spread through unofficial channels. Ivan Dzuba’s book ”Internationalism or Russification?” became one of the founding works of
the Ukrainian Nationalist Samizdat (when Ukraine
became independent, Dzuba served for 5 years as
its minister of culture). There is certain continuity
between Ukrainian nationalism of the 1960s and
current efforts to spread of the Ukrainian music on
the Internet. A number of Muzon.com users express their conviction that Muzon.com maybe illegal from the western law point of view, but it
stimulates development of the Ukrainian music.
This is seen as an important task even within
Ukraine, because many Ukrainians listen primarily to Russian language music. User ”Redsox”
writes:
The spread of Ukrainian music on muzon.com does not
reduce its sales. Those who download from the Internet
(for instance, in the US I don’t have opportunity to buy
Ukrainian), would switch to Russian music. (Maxym 2006)
Conclusions, limitations & further research
This article has examined the history and culture of the intellectual property environment in
Ukraine and also showed the technical and cultural similarities between peer-to-peer file sharing
and Samizdat. My argument is that file-sharing
practices in Ukraine reflect distinctive features of
its cultural heritage, including its socialist ideological past, the indigenous tradition of Samizdat and
its long suppressed but now ascendant nationalist
movement. Samizdat and Internet file sharing both
blur distinctions between providers and consumers of information, take place across international
boundaries, involve a largely anonymous chain of
distribution, take place outside the control of legal
authorities and turn the very act of sharing into
a political statement regardless of the content of
the work being shared. Copyright and piracy are
bound up with national identity, language, and
culture. Ukraine’s current openness to the sharing
of copyrighted materials is not simply the result of
a primitive stage of legal development. To some
Ukrainians, efforts to crack down on peer-to-peer
networks appear less like the reasonable application of widely agreed principles of intellectual
property and more as an act of imperialist hegemony. While suggestive, this article is an initial
presentation of ongoing research. Several important questions remain to be addressed. Analysis
of discussion within Muzon.com and other Ukrainian sources certainly shows widespread anti-copyright sentiment, which is sometimes linked to
appeals to nationalism, freedom and the struggle
against Soviet domination. The questions though
remain: Are these views representative? And, in
particular, are they fundamentally different from
the various techno-libertarian ideologies espoused
by hackers and open source software enthusiasts
in the West? Free software pioneer Richard Stallman, creator of the GNU project, has often been
called a communist because of his belief that computer software should be free (Mueller 2005). The
relationship of Ukrainian file-sharing ideology
to Western hacker culture is a complex one, and
requires further research. I plan to address these
questions through comparative Ukrainian and
American surveys of attitudes toward intellectual
property and file sharing, and through ethnomethodological in-person observation of Ukrainian Internet users.
There are also, of course, some real differences
though between peer-to-peer networks and Samizdat. Powerful as the comparison is, this likeness
remains more metaphorical than exact. Samizdat
made banned materials accessible, whereas much
peer-to-peer file sharing is conducted to avoid
paying for readily available materials. Good data
on file sharing practices in Ukraine is lacking,
though anecdotal evidence suggests that peer-topeer networks help Ukrainians, particularly those
living outside major urban areas, to access materials which might be otherwise unavailable within
the country at any cost.
These findings suggest that scholars concerned
with the use and social meaning of Internet file
sharing should not assume that a given technol175
Maria Haigh
ogy or network will have the same meaning for
users in all countries, but should be prepared to
integrate their studies of information sharing behavior within a broader analysis of the social and
national milieus in which they take place.
Acknowledgements
The author expresses her gratitude to Dr. Trevor
Pinch, Dr. Christine Borgman, Dr. John V. Richardson, Dr. Thomas Haigh, and the students in
The National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” Informatics Department, Kyiv, Ukraine for
their comments on the earlier versions of this paper.
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