Beyond Piracy: The Materiality of Digital Objects and the Consumption of Copyright

With the growing use of digital technologies in media consumption, companies around the world have experienced a new frontier in providing goods and services to a wider range of consumers. Despite the elevated success of digital distribution of cultural objects like music, film, video games, and books, the issue of illegal access and distribution of copyrighted materials has become a widely identified social problem. Economical, legal and criminological perspectives have largely dominated research on the topic of digital piracy, identifying and analyzing it in legal terms. Issues with these approaches arise as assumptions are carried forward in exploring and explaining these practices, resulting in their failure to identify this activity as the development of online consumption practices. In identifying this limitation in the literature, this paper sets out to create a conceptual model in approaching the study of digital piracy. Bridging the perspectives of cultural sociology with science and technology studies, my approach identifies the root of consumption practices in the properties of digital objects. Integrating the theoretical approach of cultural materiality, I explore how the conceptualization of digital objects as “dematerialized” dismisses important sociocultural dynamics of both the attributes of digital objects and the architecture of online services. In identifying the importance for a ‘digital materiality’ perspective in research on digital piracy, I explain how the form and structure of services and goods results in the development of expectations and desires leading to the consumption of copyrighted material. The resulting conceptual approach speaks to a number of possible consequences regarding how we define and understand Internet technologies. The inclusion of cultural materiality to digital content also provides a new perspective on how previous sociological definitions of materiality have been limited to a particular conceptualization of physicality.