ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author wants to look at file-sharing practices which use the BitTorrent protocol. Instead of denouncing or celebrating media piracy as either illegal or some radical form of free culture, the author wants to engage with the existing discourses about piracy and intellectual property, and shift the focus from the one concerned with access to knowledge to the one concerned with ideas of creativity. It is easy to defend Internet piracy by reading it as an act of sharing and therefore more ethical than, say, the more money-minded practice of selling DVDs. The work of Brian Larkin on video piracy in Nigeria makes two important observations. In today’s globalized world, infrastructure is distributed in an extremely unequal manner, leading to the creation of a hierarchy among users, because although the channels may exist, the actual flow of information of commodities in those channels is controlled by the economic logic of global capital.
