Audio-visual piracy: towards a study of the underground networks of cultural globalization

Abstract

With the availability of increasingly powerful means of digital reproduction, an extensive literature has developed on the pirating of audio-visual products, films, music and software, which discusses the threat this represents to Western cultural industries. This article seeks to move on from the context within which piracy has mostly been considered since the end of the 1990s — that of illicit downloading in developed countries — and to describe the phenomenon in all its many manifestations, especially in countries of the South and the East. We try here to understand to what extent pirated goods constitute, for millions of consumers in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and also in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, a major means of access to the products of local, regional and international cultural industries. By doing this, we will shed light on some of the underground channels through which cultural globalization is operating.