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Digital Piracy

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Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten

Part of the book series: Springer Reference Sozialwissenschaften ((SRS))

Abstract

The growth of digital culture has been inseparable from the growth of capacities to copy and share its products. Because cultural markets have tended to be organized around legal and practical obstacles to copying (notably via copyright law), this growth has been accompanied by continuous debate about the implications and permissible scope of those capacities, and by efforts to draw coherent and enforceable lines around unauthorized practices or ‘piracy’. This contribution outlines what we have learned about this emergent culture of copying over the past two decades, its interaction with media markets and copyright policy debates, and its evolution as cultural business models incorporate the changes in use and expectations enabled by the new technologies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for instance, GfK 2010, 2011; NPD 2012 in Germany, or the annual series of Kantar Media studies commissioned by the British telecom regulator Ofcom, to cite only a few examples.

  2. 2.

    The fourth of the large music markets is Japan, which remains organized overwhelmingly around the CD (85 %). There, the story is one of falling sales and no presence of the major streaming services as of mid-2015, due to difficulties with licensing from Japanese labels (Sisario 2014).

  3. 3.

    Among the notable exceptions are Media Piracy in Emerging Economies – a six country comparative study conducted in 2009–2010 (Karaganis 2011) and, on a larger scale, the World Internet Project, which provides a comparative framework for survey researchers working on Internet use and related digital media practices. Even WIP, however, represents too diverse a collection of materials to permit consistent comparative analysis.

  4. 4.

    And which noted that little had changed since their previous report in 2000 (Merrill and Raduchel 2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The American Assembly, Columbia University, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY, 10115, USA

    Joe Karaganis

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  1. Joe Karaganis
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Correspondence to Joe Karaganis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. TU Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

    Heidrun Friese

  2. TU Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

    Gala Rebane

  3. TU Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

    Marcus Nolden

  4. TU Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

    Miriam Schreiter

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© 2016 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH

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Karaganis, J. (2016). Digital Piracy. In: Friese, H., Rebane, G., Nolden, M., Schreiter, M. (eds) Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten. Springer Reference Sozialwissenschaften. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-08460-8_28-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-08460-8_28-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-658-08460-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Referenz Sozialwissenschaften und Recht

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