But there is a difference from the older anticopyright tradition. Fleischer claims that copyright has become absurd in the age of digital technology because it has to resort to all sorts of fictions, like distinctions between uploading and downloading or between producer and consumer, which don’t actually exist in horizontal P2P communication. Pyratbiran rejects copyright in its entirety – not because it was flawed in its inception, but because it was invented to regulate an expensive, one-way machine like the printing press, and it no longer corresponds to the practices that have been made possible by current technologies of reproduction.

These forms of behavior also included collective writings, which were often unsigned, and an explicit refusal of the copyright regime by attaching the labels “no copyright” or “anticopyright” to their works, along with the directions for use: any of the texts in this book may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted even without mentioning the source.