Suchergebnisse

When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free.

Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy is the first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers ("topsites") in the mid- to late-1990s. The "Scene," as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term "Warez" itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of "software." Taking a deep dive in the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, Warez describes the operations and infrastructures an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy.

Broad in scope and novel in its approach, Warez is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age.

Pynchon and Philosophy radically reworks our readings of Thomas Pynchon alongside the theoretical perspectives of Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno. Rigorous yet readable, Pynchon and Philosophy seeks to recover philosophical readings of Pynchon that work harmoniously, rather than antagonistically, resulting in a wholly fresh approach. Dr. Martin Paul Eve is a lecturer in literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. In addition to editing the open access journal of Pynchon Studies, Orbit, he has work published or forthcoming in Textual Practise, Neo-Victorian Studies, C21, Pynchon Notes and several edited collections. This book was originally published with exclusive rights reserved by the Publisher in (2014) and was licensed as an open access publication in [SEPTEMBER 2021] under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license if changes were made. This is an open access book.

An introduction to the special collection "The Abolition of the University".

Academic publishing, a core part of any research activity, has become, in recent years, a highly politicised act. Boycotts have arisen against the major publishers – and particularly Elsevier – over claimed monopolistic practices. At the same time, the rise of open-access (OA) publishing has presented a series of social and economic challenges that are still unresolved. While it appears to yield great promise of universal access, for many researchers, the increasing number of mandates for open-access from centre-right governments appears to betray the argument that this form of dissemination could be of greater ethical import. Coupled with high article processing charges, OA appears emptied, in many ways, of any of its political force. In this talk, Martin Paul Eve will talk about the ongoing debates around open-access publishing; the core challenges for the humanities disciplines in achieving better levels of access; and the implications of open, digital forms for the future of the scholarly monograph.

The coronavirus pandemic wrecked humanities research. Dependent on physical form books that are sold at individually prohibitive prices – with most e-versions for sale at rates even exceeding the hard copies – the shutdown of libraries worldwide was also the shutdown, for many, of the ability to learn about our cultures, histories, and artforms. Things do not have to be this way. In this talk, I will outline the behind-the-curtain economic and political-economic scenes of academic book and journal publishing, detailing the shift, in recent years, to online, open-access digital forms – and the challenges inherent in so doing.

To read or not to read seems to be the great question for literary studies of our time. More specifically, in a world of abundant literary production in which it would take more than a lifetime just to read the fiction of a single year how can we decide what to read and how to read it? Three recent books by Amy Hungerford, Lee Clark Mitchell, and Nicholas Thoburn respectively have, in their own ways, turned to this problem.

A keynote at the Open Access Monographs: from policy to reality (a one-day symposium) at the University of Cambridge

In the previous legislative period, that is from 2013 to 2017, the Grand Coalition in the Federal Republic of Germany, consisting of Christian Democratic Party (CDU, CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), under leadership of Angela Merkel, has carried out numerous reforms in the area of criminal law. Not only have the penal provisions of the Special Part of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch - StGB) been supplemented and expanded, but the basic provisions of its General Part, which are relevant and applicable to all criminal offences, have also been modified. This article presents the most important reforms. Not only are the respective motives of the legislator presented, but also the reactions of criminal science and practice. The aim is to critically assess the reforms and their impact. In addition, the article gives a brief outlook on the forthcoming German legislation in the current legislative period. The article concludes that criminal law reforms in the last legislative period mainly consisted of tightening and broadening criminal law provisions reflecting actionism and populism. The German Federal Constitutional Court is expected to review the constitutionality of several provisions. The German legislator failed to recognise that tightened rules would be ineffective in practice if prosecution did not become more effective and the likelihood of detecting crimes was not increased. In future, the re-elected Grand Coalition should take greater account of the findings of criminal science. One proposal in this context would be that the planned reform of the sanctions law for companies would also strengthen the rights of defence of companies.