Adrian Johns: Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (2010)

A killing in the English countryside takes us inside the world of pirate radio in its mid-1960s heyday.

When the pirate operator Oliver Smedley shoots and kills his rival Reg Calvert in Smedley’s country cottage on June 21, 1966, it is a turning point in the careening career of the outlaw radio stations dotting the coastal waters of England. Situated on ships and offshore forts like Shivering Sands, these stations blasted away at the high-minded BBC’s broadcast monopoly with the new beats of the Stones and the Who and DJs like Screaming Lord Sutch. For free-market ideologues like Smedley, the pirate stations were entrepreneurial efforts to undermine the growing British welfare state as embodied by the BBC.

The worlds of high table and underground collide in a riveting story full of memorable characters like the Bondian Kitty Black, an intellectual femme fatale who becomes Smedley’s co-conspirator, and the notorious Kray twins, brazenly violent operators of a London protection racket. Here is a rousing entertainment with an intellectual edge.

Publisher W. W. Norton & Company, 2010
ISBN 0393068609, 9780393068603
305 pages

WFMU’s Too Much Information show hosting the author
The Curse of TINA (Smedley’s story told by Adam Curtis, BBC)

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PDF (updated on 2012-11-11)

Jonas Andersson, Pelle Snickars (eds.): Efter the Pirate Bay (2010) [Swedish]

En bok om fildelningens teknik, politik, juridik och moral. Hur ska vi förhålla oss till vår nya digitala verklighet?

Förstår vi kraften i Internet bäst genom en uppsättning av illasinnade repressiva förkortningar (Ipred, FRA, Acta) eller genom en förutsättningslös politisk diskussion kring vilket slags lagstiftning som ska gälla för den digitala domänen? De svenska riksdagspartiernas växlande syn på fildelning och upphovsrätt har under de senaste åren flankerats av nya, och mer radikala sätt att betrakta frågan.

Boken för ett resonemang om vår nya digitala verklighet. Ett antal skribenter nalkas ämnet från olika utgångspunkter och ger en bred bild av vad som är annorlunda i vår tid; efter Pirate Bay.

Published by Mediehistoriskt Arkiv 19, Stockholm, August 2010
ISBN: 9188468259, 9789188468253
410 pages
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

comment from the editor (English)
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Joe Karaganis (ed.): Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (2011) [EN, RU, ES, CN]

“Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia.

Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

“The choice,” said Joe Karaganis, director of the project, “isn’t between high piracy and low piracy in most media markets. The choice, rather, is between high-piracy, high-price markets and high-piracy, low price markets. Our work shows that media businesses can survive in both environments, and that developing countries have a strong interest in promoting the latter. This problem has little to do with enforcement and a lot to do with fostering competition.””

Publisher The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 2011
Distributed under a Consumer’s Dilemma license
ISBN 978-0-98412574-6
440 pages

PDF (English, added on 2018-5-11)
PDFs (4 languages, from publisher; updated 2015-5-14)

See also Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education, 2018.