Special Issue on Consuming the ‘Illegal’: Situating Online Piracy in Everyday Experience
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
(Vol 19, no 1, February 2013)
Guest editors: Robert Jewitt, University of Sunderland, UK; Jason Rutter, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium; Majid Yar, University of Hull, UK
Image by Will Lion via Flickr
Research interest on peer-to-peer file exchange through services such as BitTorrent and file lockers such a MegaUpload have tended to view piracy as a product of legislative, criminal, behavioural or business contexts. It has often adopted a priori assumptions that consumers of pirated goods are ‘deviant’, ‘unethical’ or demonstrate consumer ‘misbehaviour’. Little work has yet approached piracy from an ethically neutral, bottom up, perspective and explored it through established literatures on routine consumption, everyday practice, and consumer engagement with cultural media and new technologies.
Quantitative research on piracy has demonstrated that demand for cultural goods – such as music, videogames and films – parallels that of consumption of legal versions of those goods. Moreover, research has shown that consumers of illicit downloads are also the very same people who purchase legitimate digital goods in significant quantities. In other words, piracy is profoundly linked to the ‘doing’ and ‘experiencing’ of other forms of (legitimate) consumption, rather than standing apart from it.
This special issue of Convergence seeks to bring together innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks which explore piracy through work on the socio-economics of consumption, media research and cultural policy in a manner thus far underexplored in broadening our understanding of piracy whether from a empirical, theoretical or policy relevant perspective. We invite contributions that engage with online piracy within a cultural context addressing themes including:
- Counterfeiting Cultures: Investigating tensions in the control and consumption of knowledge, social- and cultural-capital embodied in pirated texts to look at ways in which user access is limited through the use of copyright to generate revenue.
- Criminalising the Consumer: Looking at discourses of deviance in academic research as well as media representations and trade campaigns questioning their use and implications for researchers.
- Communities of Fans/Collections of Pirates: Exploring the research on enthusiasts – especially for cultural goods such as music, film and games – considering how fan identity and communities of practice integrate consumption practices.
- Policy and Practice: Considering the impacts state policy has had upon internet use, mapping the unintended consequences of legislative changes such as the emergence of services offering identity protection to file-sharers.
- Piracy and Innovation: Questioning whether piracy as a cultural, technological and political activity can have an impact on developments in business and cultural activities.
Please send all proposals and completed articles to Rob Jewitt
Deadlines for refereed research articles: 1st Feb 2012
All contributors must read the Convergence Instructions to authors before submission.
