Bodó Balázs - The role of copyright pirates in the cultural ecosystem (2010)

Bodó Balázs sa venuje problematike zdieľania kultúrnej produkcie na svojom blogu Warsystems.
Krátke zhrnutie jeho dizertačnej práce The role of copyright pirates in the cultural ecosystem from printing to file sharing networks je výživným čítaním, ktoré historicky rozširuje kontext súčasných debát k dobám knižných pirátov.
Práca je založená na charakterizácii fungovania pirátskych vydavateľov, pričom tento model aplikuje na súčasnosť.

By assembling a general framework that describes the emergence, existence and disappearance of pirate publishers, I could start explaining the role digital, file-sharing piracy plays in currant cultural flows.

But a longer historical lens suggests that the current crisis of copyright, piracy, and enforcement has much in common with earlier periods of technological change and conflict among cultural producers.

Repeatedly in the book market, high-price / low volume publishing cartels gave way to low-price / high volume markets, characterized by many more actors, higher sensitivity to market demand, and often informal agreements among publishers for managing competition.

I used quantitative methods to measure the level of interaction between digital black markets and legal movie markets in Hungary during 2008.

Zaujímavý je tento záver:

The early history of book publishing and piracy can be used to emphasize how these dynamics play out in cultural markets:

• Persistent gaps between supply and demand due to artificial constraints on price or supply will be filled by pirate producers.
• When faced with piracy, industry incumbents almost always turn to the state to defend their market positions, instead of trying to beat pirates by adjusting their business models;
• Conversely, pirate producers will tend to operate at the edges of those state jurisdictions, where differences in law create spaces of ambiguous or conflicted legality.
• Piracy, in this context, has a long-established role as a development strategy at the economic periphery, creating businesses that later go legit.
• Piracy, in this context, also acts as a counterweight to the centralized control of information—whether by states or private interests. The censorship of texts was continually undermined by pirate networks.