A complex system of rules and governance mechanisms control the lives of piratical P2P file-sharing darknets and ensure the survival and the quality of the shared P2P resource pool. In some communities these rules include the voluntary intellectual property (IP) protection as well. I show three...

2016 is the year when piracy finally became an unavoidable topic in the domain of scholarly communications. The public exposure of Sci-Hub, a copyright infringing site that provides free access to paywalled journal databases, electrified the decade old debates about the role of scholars,...

This paper introduces the new theoretical concept of technology mediated trust, or in short, mediated trust to capture and analyze the role of complex techno-social assemblages in trust production and distrust management. Societies are increasingly reliant on digital technologies to collect data;...

Decentralization is heralded as the most important technological design aspect of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). In this chapter we’ll analyze the concept of decentralization, with the goal to understand the social, legal, economic forces that produce more or less decentralized...

This paper explores the social, demographic and attitudinal basis of consumer support of a Copyright Compensation System (CCS), which, for a small monthly fee would legalise currently infringing online social practices such as private copying from illegal sources and online sharing of...

RuNet, the Russian segment of the internet is now the home of the most comprehensive scientific pirate libraries on the net. These sites offer free access to hundreds of thousands of books and millions of journal articles. In this contribution we try to understand the factors that led to the...

Emerging technologies, such as AI systems, distributed ledgers, but also private e-commerce and telecommunication platforms have permeated every aspect of our social, economic, political relations. Various bodies of the state, from education, via law enforcement to healthcare also increasingly...

Fundamental, wide-ranging, and highly consequential transformations take place in interpersonal, and systemic trust relations due to the rapid adoption of complex, planetary-scale digital technological innovations. Trust is remediated by planetary scale techno-social systems, which leads to the...

This paper discusses copyright compensation systems (CCS) -- that provide licenses for downloading and non-commercial use of copyright works in return for a fee -- in the light of welfare economics and transaction cost economics. Recent empirical studies suggest that CCS could improve social...

Heavily centralized, hierarchical, hyper-capitalistic, market based solutions were much more effective in extracting and redistributing value from the shared, distributed resources, than the communities that produced them under the naive dream of building a "commons".If the rise of fascism is...