Pirates, Hydras, Trolls, And... Authors? on the Authorial Capacities of Digital Media Piracy
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Pirates, Hydras, Trolls, and... Authors? On the Authorial Capacities of Digital Media Piracy Thomas MacDonald A Thesis in The Department of Sociology and Anthropology Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Social and Cultural Anthropology) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada April 2018 © Thomas MacDonald, 2018 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Thomas MacDonald Entitled: Pirates, Hydras, Trolls, and... Authors? On the Authorial Capacities of Digital Media Piracy and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Social and Cultural Anthropology) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final Examining Committee: Chair Dr. Amy Swiffen Examiner Dr. Fenwick Mckelvey Examiner Dr. Martin French Supervisor Dr. Maximilian Forte Approved by ___________________________________________________ Dr. Amy Swiffen, Graduate Program Director 18 May 2018 _____________________________________________ Dr. André Roy, Dean of Faculty ABSTRACT Pirates, Hydras, Trolls, and... Authors? On the Authorial Capacities of Digital Media Piracy Thomas MacDonald In this thesis, I undertake a positive analysis of digital media piracy to examine the movement’s authorial capacities. Proposed by James Meese as a way of looking beyond the traditional “piracy is theft” framework, this perspective offers new insights about how the increasingly mundane act of downloading and sharing media files can incite social change. I begin by examining what it means to be a digital media pirate, and how that question is part of the construction of the piracy movement. In the second chapter, I explore the complex relationship between piracy and information capitalism, highlighting how piracy arises from within information capitalism. In the third chapter, I look to how moral panic discourse has been used to demonize pirates, but also how this process has been appropriated by pirates to circulate counter- hegemonic discourse. In the fourth chapter, I examine how pirates are the authors of alternative ethical criteria within private filesharing communities, and how pirates mobilize moral and ethical discourse to push back against attempts to impede their ability to pursue a good piratical life. The final chapter of this thesis takes up the ethnographically rich moment of the Kickass Torrents shutdown in July 2016. Looking at the shut down as an event that like digital media piracy is both meaningful yet mundane, we see how pirates, though contesting romanticized and naturalized norms of property and authorship, push for a new form of authorship constituted by p2p communication in online spaces. Through these perspectives on the piracy movement in the summer of 2016, I argue that through the agglomerated effects of individual acts of piracy, the broader piracy movement radically changes the ways we understand and engage with cultural media objects. KEY WORDS: Digital Media Piracy, Filesharing, BitTorrent, Authorship, Internet Activism, Ethics, Moral Panics, Kickass Torrents iii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Fieldsites, Methodology and Ethics ................................................................................................................................ 2 Fieldsites ............................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Methodology ..................................................................................................................................................................... 3 Ethics ................................................................................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter Summaries .............................................................................................................................................................. 8 Chapter 1: WHOIS A Pirate? .............................................................................................................................................. 11 The Author Function ......................................................................................................................................................... 12 Pirate Typology ................................................................................................................................................................... 15 Pirate Cultures and Imaginaries ..................................................................................................................................... 18 Pirates as Innovators ..................................................................................................................................................... 18 Pirates as Activists ......................................................................................................................................................... 19 Pirates as Ordinary ........................................................................................................................................................ 23 (Trollish) Cognitive Praxis .............................................................................................................................................. 26 Pirate of Filesharer? Winking and Hoisting the Jolly Roger ................................................................................ 28 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................................ 32 Chapter 2: The Pirate, the State and the Capitalist ....................................................................................................... 34 A Tale of Two Enclosures ............................................................................................................................................... 35 Hydrarchy and Netarchy .............................................................................................................................................. 37 The Sailor’s Hydrarchy: The Many-Headed Hydra ............................................................................................ 43 The Digital Hydra: Pirates, Hackers and Crackers.............................................................................................. 46 The Authorial Capacities of Commons and Pirates ................................................................................................. 48 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................................ 55 Chapter 3: The Devilish Pirate and the Industry Troll ................................................................................................. 58 Moral Panics .................................................................................................................................................................... 59 Copyright Trolls and Nice Pirates ............................................................................................................................ 69 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................................ 75 Chapter 4: A (Good) Pirate’s Life for Me ....................................................................................................................... 77 Introduction: Pirate in a Bike Shop ............................................................................................................................... 77 Ordinary Pirate Ethics ....................................................................................................................................................... 79 A FAQ for the Good Life ............................................................................................................................................ 80 Sharing, Seeding and Leeching ................................................................................................................................. 82 iv Judging and Acknowledging ...................................................................................................................................... 84 Irony and the Voluntary IP Regime ......................................................................................................................... 86 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................................ 88 Chapter 5: We Like Copying, Just Not from a CopyKAT ......................................................................................... 90 Introduction .........................................................................................................................................................................