Only hours before my writing this, news broke that Anna’s Archive—which calls itself “the largest truly open library in human history”—was secretly sued by Spotify for scraping 86 million music files off their platform. In addition, the open source search engine hosts over 61 million books and 95 million research papers. Its administrators weren’t notified until after the takedown. “The last and only good thing on the internet is down,” social media users lamented. Many questions abound in the wake of the abrupt loss of such a resource: what does education look like for those of us who cannot afford expensive subscriptions to access research papers? Where do avid readers with financial struggles find themselves? Should knowledge and art only be restricted to those with money? Who decides which sections of society deserve access to information and consequently, opportunities?

The fall of Anna’s Archive would mean the end of an era; the death of perhaps the last bastion of populist piracy. But the hacktivist operation refuses to die. A few days ago, Anna’s Archive took to Reddit to inform their thousands of users that they are still accessible via mirrors and alternatives. Their vast fanbase volunteering and donating to the platform perfectly embodies the cultural shift in attitudes toward piracy. Just a few decades ago, the pushback against piracy by creative industries had partly succeeded in painting the practice as anti-art, even culturally taboo. But today, piracy is back with renewed zeal.

This tracks with the zeitgeist: piracy is organised civil disobedience – an anti-capitalist, anti-censorship movement. Piracy sites are the proverbial Robin Hood for the downtrodden. The appeal of the sexy renegade hacker has existed since the dawn of the internet age. To pirate now is to imagine yourself as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, raven-haired, nose pierced, rebellious and revolutionary. Justifications for piracy in the age of platform capitalism are almost paradoxically commonsensical: “if purchasing isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing,” “anti-piracy is anti-cinema.”

“A lot of resources are expended in sustaining dominant narratives that equate copying with stealing. Copyright has been cast as the ethical backbone of culture, protecting creators from harm, and anyone who bypasses that system is framed as morally suspect,” explains Aayush, open-source tech and open-knowledge systems advocate. Earlier, he says, platforms claimed to be improving access to culture and democratizing its creation. But this is an illusion that has now collapsed. Today global website visits for illicit streams shoot up by the year: going from 130 billion in 2020 to 216 billion in 2024. In India, The Rob Report noted that 51% of media consumers, about 90 million users, acquire content from pirated sources.

One of the more obvious reasons for this trend is the frustrating nature of streaming platforms today. “There is a growing mismatch between how people live and pay for culture,” states Apar Gupta, advocate and founder-director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “On one side, you have more fragmented, expensive, geo-blocked services with films and shows scattered across multiple subscriptions, prices going up and even paid tiers being stuffed with ads. On the other side, you have piracy sites that offer everything in one place on any device at zero marginal cost.”

Aayush agrees: “In what Cory Doctorow has aptly called ‘enshittification’ and we have all experienced first-hand, systems that begin by serving users then pivot to advertisers and finally strip everything for shareholders.” To make matters worse, streaming services unilaterally add to, remove, or exchange titles from content libraries, often without notice to paying users. “What was once marketed as access now feels like rental under constant threat of revocation.”

For many, piracy is about the principle and not the cost, as evidenced by all the users willing to pay for Anna’s Archive. Tech platforms are not simply inconvenient. They defeat the very purpose of the internet and what once attracted so many of us to it: the democratisation of information and art. Take Spotify: the music streaming platform (1) only pays artists $0.002-.004 per stream; (2) promotes ‘ghost artists’–cheap, generic music on playlists–to minimise royalty payments to real musicians; (3) recently invested millions of dollars in Helsing, a European tech company that develops AI for defence systems, predictably also used by Israel; (4) plays ICE advertisements between songs. The democratization sales pitch falls flat when in recent years, multi-million dollar platforms have repeatedly collaborated with authoritarian states to suppress content deemed inconvenient, controversial or dangerous. In the wake of India and Pakistan’s 2025 conflict, for instance, several songs and television shows from our neighbouring nation disappeared from Spotify, JioCinema, Netflix and more platforms in India. There is a resultant disconnect between consumer and platform values.

Even as Meta trains its models on 80+ TB of pirated books from LibGen and other platforms, piracy platforms are deemed dangerous for making the same resources freely available. But internet users are not buying it anymore. The real function of copyright has been unmasked: it does not protect artists as much as it enforces enclosure, placing corporate control over artistic freedom. This is why not a dime from copyright infringement lawsuits goes to the artists it claims to protect; why, absurdly, the severity of these laws remains the same against: (1) a vendor pirating and selling copies of the newest film out in theatres, and (2) a 13-year-old editing snippets of their favourite show, synced to their favourite song in the background. It is thus clearer than ever that paying for content today means supporting big platforms, not the artists who comprise them. We are able to see piracy less as immoral and more as a rational refusal of the systems that enclose knowledge rather than liberate it.

The failure of copyright in preserving creativity is further highlighted in the fact that the copyright belongs to platform producers, who not only create IP but also control its distribution. When distribution interests (such as watchability, virality, and brand visibility) intersect with creative production, art is watered down to its most formulaic, commercial interpretations. Adding insult to injury, the art is arbitrarily censored at will, lent and not sold to consumers, and gatekept from further creative engagement or repurposing – thanks to corporations placing a high premium on their own exclusive ownership of art. A jarring instance of this was when Disney recently denied a grieving family’s request to use a picture of Spiderman on their 4-year-old son’s gravestone. Computer programmer Aaron Swartz faced a $1M fine and 35 years in prison for downloading 70GB of articles off JSTOR. In 2013, he took his own life. In his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (2008), Swartz declared: “There is no justice in following unjust laws.”

However, we still cannot escape the fact that while technological monopolies co-opt creativity at the expense of consumers, consumers reclaim that creativity at the expense of artists: it is impossible to pirate from companies without also pirating from artists. This means that artists today are stuck in Catch-22 situations: consistently underpaid by corporations but also losing out when consumers pirate their content. They are further impacted negatively when consumers pivot to piracy because of inaccurate consumption statistics and a resultant risk to securing future opportunities. Artists, creators of culture, are thus systemically excluded from the very culture they create – thanks to corporations that extract their labour and consumers attempting to fight the corporations. We are also approaching an age where copyright laws protect AI-generated content and corporations – both non-human – more than the artists they were meant to safeguard. In this fragile landscape, the question then becomes about what the future of creation on the internet looks like.

Technology alone cannot bring in the cultural transformation we need. Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform, believes that markets must be rebuilt, not dismantled, to create better infrastructure for artists. Lawrence Lessig agrees, sketching out reforms for “radically out of date copyright laws” in his book Remix. He explains that until 1976, copyright in the USA was an opt-in system of regulation: you got the benefit of its protection only if you asked for it, otherwise your work passed into the public domain. This “automatically narrowed protection to works that–from the author’s perspective–needed it.” While he does not propose a return to this original system, he suggests a shorter term of copyright and a “maintenance obligation” for copyright owners, after an initial period of automatic protection. If an author fails to register their work after the expiry of this initial term, it can be used freely or with minimal royalty payments.

Lessig was also one of the people who established the Creative Commons license in 2002: an alternate public copyright system that enables free distribution of work. By registering for the CC license, authors give people the right to share, use, and build upon their work without fear of infringement lawsuits. Over 2.5 billion CC-licensed works exist on the internet. Content platforms like Wikipedia, Vimeo and Bandcamp also provide CC license options for creators. “In the … years since this project launched, millions of digital works have been marked to signal this freedom rather than control,” Lessig writes. “Some have used them to spread their work. Others have used them simply to say, ‘This is the picture of creativity I believe in.’”

This license builds on the concept of social production, described by Wenkler in The Wealth of Networks as prioritising abundance, access, sharing of resources and a sense of community. In contrast to market-based production, built around models of scarcity and exchange, social production shifts focus from profit to collaboration. “If we want profits, we have to think beyond centralised platform models and private property as the organising principles of knowledge and culture,” suggests Aayush. “Direct relationships between creators and audiences through subscriptions, memberships and mutual support are the only viable way forward.” A few examples of what that looks like are cooperative and worker-owned platforms, which redistribute governance and revenue. Gupta agrees: “The most viable alternative is a direct patronage model, similar to platforms like Bandcamp or Patreon, where the transactional relationship is between the fan and the artist, minimising the middleman tax.”

The last decade has seen the rise of more such models: from Substack to Buy Me a Coffee, to relatively lesser-known initiatives like Nina Protocol and Seed&Spark. A music platform built around a “community-revenue sharing model,” Nina Protocol adds a $1 fee to each purchase, split between the platform and the community member who enabled the sale through link-sharing. Artists get to keep 100% of their revenue and their music is preserved permanently on the Arweave blockchain. Meanwhile, Seed&Spark is creating a new studio model where a Patrons Circle teams up to support emerging filmmakers’ crowdfunding campaigns. It has an 80% crowdfunding success rate. These models remember something crucial that conventional markets either forget or choose to ignore: creativity is free but creation is not.

But until these systems become the norm, many go as far as describing piracy as the only ethical consumption under capitalism. If piracy feels normal now, this is a positive sign: the gatekeepers of culture and entertainment are finally losing legitimacy. “Historically,” finishes Aayush. “That is always the moment when new systems become possible. This is an opening.” As Aaron Swartz declared: “Sharing isn’t immoral–it’s a moral imperative.”