Abstract
The essays in A Reader in International Media Piracy: Pirate Essays, edited by Tilman Baumgärtel, constitute a substantial and valuable addition to the contemporary field of pirate studies. The diversity of the “Pirate Essays” contained within allows the collection to both reflect the ongoing concerns in the field and broaden the scope of these concerns by presenting the reader with a selection of essays that are vigorously transnational and transmedia in their focus. A reflection of the field in its current state can be seen in a representative distribution of subject matter; the book opens with several case studies, supports this more applied material with an exploration of applicable theory, and concludes by linking piracy to more traditional media study concerns. The book’s greatest value, however, is as a text which performs a critical intervention within the contemporary field of piracy studies, particularly for scholarship emanating from the Global North, which focuses disproportionately on politically motivated digital piracy. Against this disproportionate attention, A Reader in International Media Piracy presents multiple case studies that bring attention both to the materiality of piracy as a practice and to its role in global media flows. These case studies, alongside the supportive theoretical chapters which will also be briefly touched upon in this review, render the collection a valuable resource as both a holistic introduction to piracy within media studies and a critical redirection within piracy studies itself.
Tony Tran’s chapter “Piracy on the ground: How informal media distribution and access influences the film experience in contemporary Hanoi, Vietnam” (p. 51) exemplifies this critical disruption by identifying the vital role that pirated DVDs perform for Vietnamese audiences, who might otherwise be unable to access media deemed “global,” in aspiration if not in actual distribution. Tran’s participant observation of three pirate DVD shops, which included informal interviews with pirate shop owners and workers and observation of the consumption habits of the stores’ customers, further demonstrated an iterative approach which proved effective when dealing with an infrastructure as necessarily fluid and adaptive as the pirate production–consumption cycle. The study, thus, not only serves to bring attention to the quotidian and integrated nature of material piracy practices in the lives of many Vietnamese but also suggests methodology for pirate participant-observation studies going forward, with applicable lessons for both offline and online approaches.
One oversight in Tran’s study, however, is a lack of precision in terms of data gathering, as there is a marked absence of clarity regarding his sampling and data collection processes. Further case studies in the book suggest this may be an incidental feature of this kind of informal approach, as a similarly imprecise research design is employed by Yonatan Reinberg in his chapter, “Evasionary publics: Materiality and piracy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil” (p. 27). Reinberg, likewise taking an iterative and flexible approach through informal observation and interviews of street vendors in Rio, also contributes to the critical redirection of the field by highlighting piracy as a material practice and noting how piracy creates cultural space in the Global South.
Straddling the boundary between case studies and a more theoretical focus, Jonas Andersson Schwarz, in “Honorability and the pirate ethic” (p. 81), approaches piracy through the lens of sociotechnical organization. Schwarz uses the archive as a focal point through which to analyze various forms of organization among digital pirates—with additional consideration of hackers as a similarly organized, resistance-based community of practice. While departing from the material focus that characterizes the opening of A Reader in International Media Piracy, Schwarz nevertheless carries forward many previously established themes, particularly the exploration of distribution systems and their impact on audience reception of content. In order to do so, Schwarz draws upon his embedded observations from within several online data collections, departing from preceding case studies by examining non-visual content, choosing instead the pirate text archives, Aaaaarg and Avaxhome, as his sites of observation. Schwarz’s contribution rounds out the essay collection with a consideration not only of digital piracy but also of the particular technical architectures which organize it, exemplified by his attempt to reconcile heterarchical and an-archivist tendencies in file-sharing communities.
Stefan Meretz’s chapter, “On the political economy of copy protection” (p. 131), returns to an analytical trend evident in both Tran and Reinberg’s studies, as well as in the introduction by Baumgärtel, who argues that anti-piracy initiatives are often the tools of imperialism, used to enforce a “Western notion of intellectual property rights that often has no equivalent in local traditions or current cultural practice” (p. 14). Meretz is less focused on explicitly framing piracy as an anti-imperialist practice than the case studies, but instead nuances the argument through a “conceptual logical-historical reconstruction” of the emergence of the copy within capitalism, thus critically engaging with intellectual property and copy protection as ideological forms. Meretz’s major contribution is the identification of intended purpose—this is what is copied, he argues, rather than the object incarnate—in leading toward his concluding argument that the general availability of copies, particularly digital ones, will necessitate a societal adjustment rather than a continued struggle against their dissemination.
While they form only a portion of the book’s offerings, the above chapters capture the substantial contributions which A Reader in International Media Piracy makes to the contemporary field of piracy. While some of content in the collection suffers a lack of clarity regarding method—which may itself be symptomatic of the challenges faced by researchers attempting to write “Pirate Essays”—the collection as a whole constitutes an important reorientation of the field. Examination of piracy as a material practice inextricable from consumption of media deemed “global,” and yet not globally accessible, provides a critical intervention in how piracy must be viewed within the sociopolitical contexts of the Global South. Considerations of distribution carry over into pieces with a more theoretical focus, serving as a reminder that, as Yonatan Reinberg tells us, piracy “stands in as a continuous process and discourse—not merely an act—that creates a cultural space involving specific actors, limits, times and places” (p. 27).