GoKawiilWhen most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free.
Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy is the first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites”) in the mid- to late-1990s. The “Scene,” as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term “Warez” itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of “software.” Taking a deep dive in the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, Warez describes the operations and infrastructures an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy.
Broad in scope and novel in its approach, Warez is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age.
Addeddate 2022-11-28 16:47:47 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s29brp8cpzn Isbn 9781685710361
9781685710378 Lccn 2021951510 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Openlibrary_edition OL35740478M Openlibrary_work OL26453556W Page_number_confidence 100 Page_number_module_version 1.0.5 Pages 445 Ppi 300 Scanner Internet Archive Python library 3.0.2 Source https://doi.org/10.53288/0339.1.00 Thoth-dissemination-service 0.1.0 Thoth-work-id b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157 Worldcat (source edition) 1294654707 Show More Show Less
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