Piracy Years : Internet File Sharing in a Global Context

The Piracy Years: Internet File Sharing in a Global Context is the first collection to provide an overview of digital piracy’s recent past and its potential futures. Combining research essays, interviews, and overviews, the volume 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, this 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 Piracy Years is an essential resource for researchers, post-graduate students, and anyone interested in the global spread and ever-increasing importance of digital piracy.

Holger Briel is currently Dean of the School of Culture and Creativity at the joint Hong Kong Baptist-Beijing Normal University in Zhuhai, China. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultural Theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and his research interest lie in media and cultural studies, philosophy and digital social sciences. He is also a correspondent for several international newspapers. For many years, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies and on numerous journal boards. In 2021, he was the recipient of National South Korean Senior Fellowship in Cultural Studies. In recognition of his expertise in global education, he has also been elected to many national education supervisory bodies, and holds a membership in the EU Council for Higher Education He is currently working on a volume on changing visual regimes in the 21st century.

Michael D High is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. His research interests are media piracy, Hollywood cinema, American popular culture, and digital fandom. His research papers have appeared in the International Journal of Communication and Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. He also has contributed book chapters to edited collections published Wiley-Blackwell and Routledge.

Markus Heidingsfelder, PhD, is Associate Professor of Media Studies, Division of Humanities & Social Sciences, United International College Zhuhai. His work has appeared in Soziale Systeme, Zeitschrift für Semiotik, Kybernetes, Systems Research & Behavioral Science, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, among others. His most recent books are: Trump - beobachtet (Springer 2020), Corona - Weltgesellschaft im Ausnahmezustand (Ed., w. M. Lehmann, Velbrück 2020), George Spencer-Brown’s “Design with the NOR”. With Related Essays (Ed., w. S. Roth, L. Clausen, K. B. Larsen, Emerald 2020).