ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the history of online media piracy through an autonomist Marxist framework of composition-struggle-decomposition, and considerations of political conflicts between skilled vs. unskilled labor. I begin with a detailed examination of the social organization of the computer subculture of software pirates. I then move on to a discussion of the rise of Napster as a deskilling of existing pirate practices, which led to the composition of a mass of pirates, and an ensuing panic over a media industry set for dramatic disruption. Where Napster uncomfortably and unsuccessfully straddled the divide between hacker culture, online neophytes, and the emerging startup economy, subsequent piratical efforts, from Gnutella to the Pirate Bay, were openly political and antagonistic, seeking to extend unauthorized media distribution online as far as possible. Simultaneously, the culture industries sought to decompose pirates through legal action, and recompose them as an audience through technological restructuring of media distribution to accommodate new digital media consumption practices. Legitimate and illegitimate media distribution remain locked in a struggle which contributes to a rapidly changing and deeply politicized technological landscape.
