ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the history of intellectual property battles online grounded in the dynamics of capitalist restructuring and social struggle. It examines the rise of the Internet and digital media as a site of accumulation, and reviews the accompanying insurrections from hacker culture, the Free Software movement and the projects for copyright reform in terms of labor struggles. The book offers a history of digital piracy, from early computing, through Bulletin Board System software pirates, peer-to-peer file sharing, and up to the moment of streaming media. It also examines other theories of digital piracy in an effort to discern pirate politics. The book describes the unrealized political potentials of piracy, and the wider problems in theorizations of the politics of digital culture. Piracy was either an activity taken by entitled miscreants, or it was an unfortunate side effect of digital technology.
