Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy ― Intellectual Property and Labor Under Neoliberal Restructuring

Media piracy--the production, distribution and consumption of media texts in violation of intellectual property laws--has become an endemic feature of the cultural economy since the rise of the internet. While most analyses present piracy either in terms of moral or legal failings, or alternatively, the inevitable by-product of digital technologies, this book situates piracy as a symptom of a much larger restructuring of cultural labor in the era of the internet: labor that is digital, entrepreneurial, informal and even illegal, and increasingly politicized. Sketching the contours of this new political economy while engaging with theories of digital media, both critical and celebratory, Mueller reveals piracy as a submerged social history of the digital world, and potentially the key to its political reimagining.

Gavin C. Mueller is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Emerging Media and Communication at The University of Texas at Dallas, USA