Bulgarian pirates: At the world's end |
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| Authors: | Julia Rone |
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| Institution: | Department of Theory and History of Culture , Sofia University , Bulgaria |
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| Abstract: | The present article compares the strategies of the legitimation of piracy developed by Western authors such as Richard Stallman and Larry Lessig with those developed by everyday Bulgarian pirates. It attempts to escape from the usual debate between the entertainment industries and the supporters of free culture, and to open the field for new perspectives. In Bulgaria it is precisely “free” as in “free beer” that matters, since the prices of cultural products tend to be too high for the Bulgarian market. In many cases, there is no possible legal access to the cultural products desired. The digital library “Chitanka” illustrates how piracy as bottom-up initiative compensates for the lack of successful public policies oriented towards visually impaired people and Bulgarian emigrants abroad. Although mobility and de-territorialisation have made piracy possible, it is perceived as a deeply national cause. The article emphasises that a difference should be made between open non-commercial projects as “Chitanka” and commercial torrent trackers, which thrive in the grey economy and abuse the symbolic capital of free culture. Piracy should be analysed at the intersections of global economic shifts and their local repercussions, of transnational culture flows and local culture infrastructure. Only this kind of an approach is likely to help us trace the unstable border between the cases in which digital piracy is a problem of the grey economy, and those in which it offers original non-market solutions to deeper structural problems. |
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| Keywords: | digital piracy Bulgaria torrent trackers grey economy free culture access |
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