Ariel Glenn

Tags	Censorship
Primary Session	Advancing the Contributor Experience
Secondary Sessions

Think like a Pirate: How to beat Internet censorship

Universal access to a digital good such as the knowledge curated and made available via Wikimedia projects, presupposes access without censorship.

Censorship and circumvention methods become more advanced over time. Censorship ranges from blocks of single articles to targeting DNS providers to seizing servers to shutting off Internet access completely. Some of these methods are in use right now against Wikimedia projects.

One form of censorship evasion has proven virtually impossible to stamp out: piracy of copyrighted content, in particular music and movies. Let's look at the methods used by the pirates and adapt them for use by Wikimedia content providers and users. We would like our content to be widely shared, available everywhere. Here is what we need to get started:

1. Content must be downloadable and usable off-line.

  * Content meant to be used online, that requires contact with an external server, fails this test. Movies and music do not.

2. Content must be partitionable.

  * You don't grab all alternative music for 2017, but just the albums from the artists you want.  Users will likely not need or want all of the English language Wikipedia (for example) but only subsets.

3. Content must be usable off-line by applications everyone has.

  * Movies and music are downloaded in formats that play in apps that come standard with every OS on every platform.  Usability must include navigation and search of content.

4. Downloadable content must be easy to find, both before and after censorship.

  * You ask Google to find the music or movie you want on YouTube or elsewhere, click and download. Failing that, there is a fallback (see below).

5. Tech-savvy downloaders must be able to seed the distribution of content to everyone else.

  * For music or movies, folks who download from private torrent trackers make copies to give to all their friends; six degrees of separation later, we have reached saturation.

6. Content must be popular enough to be widely shared.

  * If a group of consumers cannot locate a content source or redistributor, the distribution chain breaks.  Poorly seeded torrents are the classic example.

7. People must not rely solely on the original online content source for access.

  * If no one has downloaded or mirrored a copy before access to the original content source is blocked, this approach fails.  Note that most people will have little incentive to save copies of content for offline use from a reliable site, unless Internet access itself is spotty, or the content bundles for download add value.

In some jurisdictions, it may be dangerous to possess certain content, including that of the Wikimedia projects. This issue is outside the scope of this proposal.