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The Piracy Years: Internet File Sharing in a Global Context

Online ISBN:
9781802072525
Print ISBN:
9781802070545
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

The Piracy Years: Internet File Sharing in a Global Context

Holger Briel (ed.),
Holger Briel
(ed.)
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Michael High (ed.),
Michael High
(ed.)
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Markus Heidingsfelder (ed.)
Markus Heidingsfelder
(ed.)
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Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
1 August 2023
Online ISBN:
9781802072525
Print ISBN:
9781802070545
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

This book provides an overview of digital piracy’s recent past and its potential futures. It brings together leading scholars and infamous digital pirates from China, Germany, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In June 1999, the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing website Napster transformed the availability of online content, but the site was quickly sued into oblivion. Despite the highly publicised shutdowns of a number of P2P websites, many continue to thrive, and digital piracy has become a global phenomenon. This book argues that any future media theory and research will have to contend with such web practices remaining an integral and politically formative part of the Internet. Offline and online piracies thrive on technological affordances in opposition to corporate efforts — in music, film, publishing, and academia — to label them as threatening to the economy and society. Therefore, the book explores piracy as a phenomenon navigating the conventions, norms, and boundaries of legality in digital cultures. Pirate networked sociabilities work within and outside the fringes of market economy through the lens of institutional and discursive power. By creating new ways that keep society moving and from stagnation, they ensure its continued existence — including the survival of the very areas they attack. The book is an essential resource for researchers, post-graduate students, and anyone interested in the global spread and ever-increasing importance of digital piracy.

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