Popular Communication, Piracy and Social Change

Digital piracy cultures and peer-to-peer technologies combined to spark transformations in audio-visual distribution between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Digital piracy also inspired the creation of a global anti-piracy law and policy regime, and counter-movements such as the Swedish and German Pirate Parties. These trends provide starting points for a wide-ranging debate about the prospects for deep and lasting changes in social life enabled by piratical technology practices. This edited volume brings together contemporary scholarship in communication and media studies, addressing piracy as a recombinant feature of popular communication, technological innovation, and communication law and policy. An international collection of contributors highlights key debates about piracy, popular communication, and social change, and provides a lasting resource for global media studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Communication.

Jonas Andersson Schwarz is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Södertörn University, Sweden. He specializes in digital media cultures and technologies, and how these are structurally conditioned.

Patrick Burkart is Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA. He researches information law and policy, political economy, and popular communication, and is co-editor in chief of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture.