Popular communication, piracy and social change / edited by Jonas Andersson Schwarz and Patrick Burkart.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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.

Mobility through piracy, or how Steven Seagal got to Malawi / Jonathan Gray -- "Honorable piracy" and Chile's digital transition / Jennifer Ashley -- Piracy, geoblocking, and Australian access to niche independent cinema / Rebecca Beirne -- Anti-market research : piracy, new media metrics, and commodity communities / Jeremy Wade Morris -- The piratical ethos in streams of language / Justin Lewis -- The media archaeology of file sharing : broadcasting computer code to Swedish homes / Jörgen Skågeby -- Anonymous and the political ethos of hacktivism / Luke Goode.