The subpolitics of online piracy: A Swedish case study

Abstract

‘Pirates’ and ‘anti-pirates’ have become common concepts in the cultural political debate, as the file-sharing phenomenon is a delicate and disputed subject. The fact that people organize in networks to share data with each other has led film and music companies from all over the world to initiate a number of anti-piracy organizations, assigned to protect the property rights to culture and information. In Sweden, the industrial organization The Swedish Bureau of Anti-Piracy on the one side, and the network The Bureau of Piracy together with The Pirate Party, on the other, play important parts in the prevailing conflict. The purpose of this article is to apply a sociological perspective on the collective act of file sharing. By focusing on the distinctly organized part of file sharing activities as well as on the everyday practices of users, the goal is to describe how the collective action and the production of knowledge, taking place in relation to online piracy, can be understood.

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