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. Copyright
as a frame for understanding piracy's relationship to capitalism has left potentially more
crucial areas of study neglected. 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. The thesis argues that it is possible and
necessary to push beyond the constraints of copyright activism and intellectual property
and in so doing opens up new areas of inquiry into online media piracy's potential to
challenge logics of property and commodification.
Original research is presented in the form of a highly detailed description and
analysis of private BitTorrent filesharing sites. These sites are secretive and yet to
receive 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 and thus tempers more
extreme views of piracy as wholly revolutionary and emancipatory, and those that see
pirate as a 'simple' form of theft.
Public and private BitTorrent filesharing are theorised through the lens of
Autonomist Marxism, a perspective that has a novel view of technology both as a tool
of domination and a force for potential emancipation. Piracy is analysed 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. The thesis further analyses BitTorrent piracy's relationship to the
'common', the shared capacities for creating knowledge, ideas, affects.
The thesis concludes that further scholarly research must move beyond concerns
for creators' remuneration and its focus on reforming existing copyright policy and
instead engage with the emergent institutional structures of organised media piracy.
Though publicly accessible BitTorrent piracy has contributed to a broadening of
awareness about issues of access to information, such an awareness often leaves in place
logics of private property and capitalist accumulation. Finally, the thesis argues that the
richness and complexity of private sites' organisational valences carry with them greater
potential for radically destabilising capitalist social relations with regard to the
distribution of cultural production.