Ebook: The Ambivalences of Piracy: BiTtorrent Media Piracy and Anti-capitalism

This thesis argues that a more nuanced study of online media piracy is necessary in order to augment the dominant focus on piracy’s relationship to copyright. The dominance of copyright as a frame for understanding piracy’s relationship to capitalism has left other potentially more crucial areas of study neglected. In particular, the thesis argues that an approach to understanding the relationship of media piracy to anticapitalist projects must engage with forms of media piracy in their specificity and not as a homogeneous field. By looking to specific forms of media piracy I argue that it is possible and necessary to push beyond the constraints of copyright activism and intellectual property discourse. In so doing, this thesis opens up new areas of inquiry into online media piracy’s challenges to regimes of property and commodification; it also reveals the ways in which piracy reinforces these very same disempowering elements of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

The thesis presents original research in the form of a highly detailed description and analysis of private BitTorrent filesharing sites. These sites are very secretive and have not yet received scholarly attention in such a detailed and systematic way. This research finds both public and private variants of BitTorrent media piracy to be highly ambivalent with regards to their transformative potentials in relation to capital. Thus, the research presented here tempers more extreme views of piracy as wholly revolutionary and emancipatory, and those that see pirate as a ‘simple’ form of theft.

I theorise public and private BitTorrent filesharing through the lens of Autonomist Marxism, a theoretical perspective that has resonance with this topic because of its historically novel view of technology both as a tool of domination and a force for potential emancipation. Thus, I analyse piracy for its capacity to refuse the valorisation of the enjoyment of music or film via the surveillance and tracking of audiences, which has become typical for contemporary legal online distribution venues. I analyse BitTorrent piracy’s relationship to the ‘common’, the shared capacities for creating knowledge, ideas, affects and the conditions of life. BitTorrent piracy’s ambivalence is instructive in revealing the deeper relationships between capital and Internet technologies. understanding the specifics of this ambivalence is, however, also creates the conditions for imagining new autonomous ways for engaging in the distribution of cultural production, and the opening up of subjectivities toward the common.