Table Of ContentMedia Piracy in the
Cultural Economy
This book takes a Marxist approach to the study of media piracy – the
production, distribution, and consumption of media texts in v iolation
of intellectual property laws – to examine its place as an endemic
feature of the cultural economy since the rise of the Internet.
The author explores media piracy not in terms of its moral or legal
failings, or as the inevitable by-product of digital technologies, but 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.
This significant contribution to the study of piracy and digital culture
will be vital reading for scholars and students of critical media studies,
cultural studies, political theory, or digital humanities, and particularly
those researching media piracy, digital labor, the digital economy, and
Marxist theory.
Gavin Mueller was born in Columbus, Ohio. He holds a PhD in
Cultural Studies from George Mason University. He currently teaches
New Media and Digital Culture in the Media Studies program at the
University of Amsterdam.
This is a beautifully written and engaging publication that makes
a very important contribution to the growing literature on media
piracy. Mueller not only examines piracy as a c ulturally embedded
activity, but he expertly uses Marxist theory to elucidate his argu-
ment that piracy must be seem as a part of the greater reorganisation
of labour in the digital era. Media Piracy in the C ultural Economy
is essential reading for anyone interested in looking b eyond purely
economic concerns and instead examining how piracy is inextricably
connected to wider social and political shifts.
—Virginia Crisp, King’s College London
Media Piracy in the
Cultural Economy
Intellectual Property and Labor
under Neoliberal Restructuring
Gavin Mueller
First published 2019
by Routledge
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© 2019 Gavin Mueller
The right of Gavin Mueller to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-30381-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-73072-0 (ebk)
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 Theories of Late Capitalist Restructuring:
Neoliberalism and Post-Fordism 4
2 The Critique of the Digital Political Economy 28
3 A History of Digital Piracy 57
4 Theorizing Piracy 77
5 Global Piracy 99
Conclusions: The End of P2P 114
Index 125
Acknowledgments
Any book is a collective process with contributions too numerous to
name. I would like to single out several individuals, without whom
this work would not have been possible. First of all, my wife and part-
ner Katherine Casey, who bore with me through the long and difficult
process of completing this work. I am also grateful for the support of
my parents, Scott and Sharon, and my brother, Chad. As this book
began as my dissertation project, I would like to thank Paul Smith, my
dissertation chair, for pushing me on questions great and small, as well
as the other members of my committee, Char Miller and J.P. Singh,
for the generosity of their time and effort. I would like to extend those
thanks to the other faculty and affiliates in George Mason University’s
Cultural Studies program, who provided a continual atmosphere of
rigorous intellectual inquiry and curiosity at an enviably high level of
sophistication, especially Roger Lancaster, Denise Albanese, Alison
Landsberg, and Matt Karrush. Tim Kaposy and Mark Sample, who
are no longer with the university, provided much appreciated early
guidance. I benefited from numerous conversations and freely given
insights from my peers and colleagues surrounding critical theory,
economics, technology, and politics, which have left an indelible mark
on this work. At the risk of leaving off names, I’d like to thank John
Carl Baker, Julian Duane, Daniel Greene, Asad Haider, Geraldine
Juárez, Kimberly Klinger, Larisa Mann, Wayne Marshall, Salar
Mohandesi, Zac Petersen, Ryan Vu, and Björn W estergard. Finally, I’d
like to thank the pirates whose projects, many now shuttered, enabled
so much of this research.
Introduction
This work in this book stems from my intellectual commitments to
historical materialism and to the politics embedded in popular prac-
tices. This is to say, it is both a book of Marxist theory and a work
of cultural studies. I am interested in how contestatory social and
cultural formations emerge from the contradictions of capitalism in
our era, how they struggle, and how they shape history.
These commitments color my approach to thinking about the
Internet. The categories of Marxist analysis – the commodity,
property, the technologies of production, and labor – all appear in
the digital realm, often in novel ways, and subject to novel theoriza-
tions, many of which I will cover in the following pages. But Marx
was not simply a social theorist of capitalism. He was also a political
theorist of clashes between and among classes. This informs my own
theorization of the digital: it is not simply an assemblage of new tech-
nologies or new ways of doing business. It is a context for new kinds of
struggles, where actors compose themselves in new ways to fight what
are often much older battles.
Media piracy seemed like a social phenomenon that embodied so
much of what interests me about struggles under capitalism, and it
seemed so rarely understood this way. Piracy was either an activity
taken by entitled miscreants, or it was an unfortunate side effect of
digital technology. And Marxists had largely ignored it altogether,
even while they produced much interesting analysis about digital
technology. After all, Marxist politics traditionally focuses on strug-
gles between labor and capital on the shop floor, seemingly a world
away from teenagers downloading music files.
My argument is that media piracy, like much else online, can
fruitfully be conceptualized in terms of labor, and that this offers us
a better understanding of piracy and many other activities digital cul-
tures engage in, and may even add depth to digital politics. In turn, a
