Piracy Cultures| Poisoning the Affective Economy of RW Culture: Re-Mapping the Agents

Dan Fleming

Abstract


Piracy culture as a concept is organized around a series of widely accepted facts: e.g. that copyright infringements are widespread, that the entertainment industries have to do something about this, that ordinary users wanting a share of “remix” culture are getting caught up in this. The paper accepts that “Read/Write” culture is a useful formulation and then seeks to re-map the relationships among key agents in piracy culture as a field of specific practices. It is suggested that several mutually dependent fantasies lock these agents together. Recent research on technical activities in the area of filesharing reveals what the paper characterizes as a deliberate poisoning of the affective economy on which both “piracy” and a creative “Read/Write” culture depend.

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