The Ancient Art Of Digital Publishing

Digital piracy is a common aspect on the web, and internet users are sometimes or even often part of it because an act of piracy is easily done. There are several sharing activities where piracy is involved such as peer-to-peer sharing, usenet groups, and emailing your favourite song to a friend. These acts of data sharing are mostly low-level and do not have a distinct hierarchy of 'organized piracy'. What contrasts the distributed sharing of data through usenet and p2p is how top-level piracy is organized, which is compared to the open nature of the web extremely organized and within its communities centralized. These communities and its specialized release groups for pirated content together form 'The Scene'. Castells and his investigation in the Network Society (1996) explained how social structures are not organized around traditional physical forms of organization but around electronic networks, enabling distributed communities. Piracy groups adopted this new possibility of organization in its earliest form and made its appearance before the internet was established through early computer clubs and Bulletin Board Systems (Craig et al., 2005). The Scene has always been the first to respond to demand and to actually publish traditional hardcopy content such as film (vhs/dvd/blu-ray), music (cd), games (cd/dvd), and books (print) (short e-book history) to a networked medium that makes digital distribution possible. Something the print-based economy has neglected for many years.[....]

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