When 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 of 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.
Hi, would it be possible to buy it somewhere else besides Amazon?
Thank you!
B.
The book is print-on-demand from Amazon; we don’t have another avenue through which to sell the book. Apologies! But the e-book is available for free directly from our website.
Hi Eileen,
thank you very much for your reply, I know, I downloaded it, but I love reading on paper, and I wanted to show some appreciation for the work that went behind it.
Cheers!
B.
take the pdf, output to a digital copier, take to Kinkos or AlphaGraphics and have them bind it for a few bucks.
– Tickle
hi,
will epub (and not only PDF) version will be available?
For now, our ebooks are delivered as PDFs, partly because we are a print- and design aesthetics-forward press. We’re retro that way. And if anyone wants to take the PDF and turn it into an ePub, or any other version, we’re cool with that.
Hello, I was a peripheral member of scene in China when I was young.
It’s so excited to read your book.
I would like to know would you mind if I want to translate this book into Chinese? And the appropriate authorization method, such as publishing on github under the Creative Commons Attribution License?
Hi please write us an email and we’d be happy to discuss a Chinese translation!