Steal This Station: The Videofreex and Radical Banality of Pirate Broadcasting (original) (raw)
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Piracy in the media is a complex phenomenon linked to various ideas of art, ethics, community and legality. This paper will trace my experience in exploring piracy in various frameworks and contexts; the possible identities of the pirate as someone engaged in the phenomenon, including the criminal, the philanthropist, and the artist; the link between these identities and media infrastructure; the idea of 'freedom' and free culture; and my methods exploring the concepts and producing knowledge.
boundary 2, 2022
Available here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article/49/1/231/294856/Utopia-in-a-Package-Digital-Media-Piracy-and-the?guestAccessKey=000e01a6-bb04-4845-a230-99af5c3dc4a1 Abstract: Following the 1959 revolution, the Cuban state nationalized media outlets on the island and has controlled them ever since. Since 2010, however, this monopoly has been threatened by the paquete (package), one terabyte of pirated digital media collected by independent Cuban entrepreneurs and circulated through informal distribution networks across the island using flash drives and hard drives. Combining archival and textual analysis with ethnographic research, this article analyzes how the legacy of state socialism gave distinctive shape to experiences and perceptions of digital media piracy as well as the influx of global entertainment genres and the rise of new forms of domestic cultural production, especially advertising, that the paquete enabled” to “this article analyzes how the legacy of state socialism gave distinctive shape to experiences and perceptions of digital media piracy. I show how the state’s history of contravening international copyright provided justification for piracy and how cultural producers and consumers worked to reconcile revolutionary aspirations for socialist art with the influx of global entertainment and the rise of new forms of local cultural production, especially advertising, enabled by the paquete. A short, public-facing analysis of this research was previously published online through Cultural Anthropology's Fieldsights; available here: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/utopia-in-a-package-digital-media-piracy-and-the-politics-of-entertainment-in-cuba
The Farcical Side to the War on Media Piracy
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This article examines "crack intros," short animated audiovisual presentations that reside at the crossroads of software piracy, creativity, and communication. Since the beginning of the home computer era in the late 1970s, users have copied and shared software with one another. Informal swapping between friends quickly evolved into organized piracy, known as the "warez scene," which operated across borders. Starting in the early 1980s, pirated games were often accompanied by screens where groups boasted their accomplishments and sent messages to others. The screens soon turned into flashy intros that contained animated logos, moving text, and music. In this article, we describe crack intros from three different perspectives: first, through their history; second, by treating them as creative artifacts; and, finally, by considering them as a communication medium. The three perspectives offer a novel peek into the practices of early software piracy and its little-known creative aspects.
Piracy & Social Change| The Pirate Party and the Politics of Communication
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This article draws on a series of interviews with members of the Pirate Party, a political party focusing on copyright and information politics, in different countries. It discusses the interviewees' visions of democracy and technology and explains that copyright is seen as not only an obstacle to the free consumption of music and movies but a threat to the freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and a thriving public sphere. The first part of this article briefly sketches how the Pirate Party's commitment to the democratic potential of new communication technologies can be interpreted as a defense of a digitally expanded lifeworld against the attempts at colonization by market forces and state bureaucracies. The second part problematizes this assumption by discussing the interactions between the Pirate movement and the tech industry in relation to recent theories on the connection between political agency and social media.
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This chapter concerns the emergence and growing popularity of the international pirate party movement. We survey critical approaches to the phenomenon of piracy, consider the usefulness of this concept in discussions of digital practices commonly labeled ‘media piracy,’ and discuss the role of the pirate parties in opposing conflicts around these practices. Contrasting the international pirate party movement with the historical figure of the maritime pirate, we approach the modern-day pirates through Christopher Kelty’s concept of the ‘geek,’ which describes individuals motivated by the desire to preserve their ability to use digital tools for the sharing of information, communication, and creative purposes. Our discussion highlights some of the gross imbalances imposed by current copyright laws on digital culture and on the private use of digital technologies, and proposes that the activities of today’s so-called pirates can be understood as a critical commentary on the vilification and criminalization to which everyday users of digital technologies are often subjected. In considering how these imbalances are reflected in the rhetoric of the pirate party movement, ultimately we suggest that the movement represents an experimental arena of political dissent and policy reform efforts.