Bellwethers of Change: Book Piracy in Context

Abstract

The main focus of this contribution is digital piracy: the mass, unauthorized, online exchange of copyright-protected works such as books, music, and audiovisual content. We regard digital piracy as an incredibly diverse, multifaceted, and often incommensurable set of complex social practices. However, this diversity, the substantial and informative differences between different piratical practices and the actors who play a role it, are rendered invisible, and in some sense irrelevant by the fact that they are most often regarded and dealt with through the discourse of law. This approach, which collapses different communities, geographies, ideologies, and economic conditions of piracy into the attractive but impersonal binary of legality, robs us of valuable knowledge. As we argue below, by looking at the economic, social, and political aspects of piracy, we can learn a lot about the strengths and especially, the weaknesses of the current organization of the production and circulation of cultural artefacts.

Keywords: digital piracy, shadow libraries, book piracy, cultural black markets, economoic studies, copyright

JEL Classification: p16, p48, k11