I’m filing this in public to get it off my hard drive: In this talk, given at UCL on 26 Oct 2009, Peter Willett challenges the story of the internet’s military origins and argues, instead, that it emerged from civil society. The page for the original video talk is long since gone. It reminds me of my friend and colleague Joe Karaganis’s book Shadow Libraries (OA, of course: downoad link), the result of an SSRC-sponsored longitudinal comparative study of copy cultures in several countries. tl;dr: Sites like Library Genesis, Anna’s Archive, Z-Lib, and Sci-Hub can trace their origins, in different ways, to the underground lit-sharing networks that grew up in repressive regimes — the USSR, South Africa, Brazil under repressive regimes, and so on. But that’s a broad-brush structural argument; Willett’s talk is well a listen for the specifics — and he’s a great speaker, too