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urn:uuid:b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157 03 15 9781685710361 00 EB E101 10 01 01 Warez The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy 1 A01 Martin Paul Eve <bold><ext-link xlink:href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5589-8511">Martin Paul Eve</ext-link></bold> is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London and Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University. He has published books on a wide variety of topics, including <italic>Close Reading with Computers</italic> (Stanford, 2019), <italic>password</italic> (Bloomsbury, 2016), <italic>Pynchon and Philosophy</italic> (Palgrave, 2014), and <italic>Open Access and the Humanities</italic> (Cambridge, 2014), among others. 01 eng 00 444 03 10 COM060040 23 Cultural Studies+Critical Theory 12 JKVK 23 piracy 10 COM079010 23 Media+Technology 12 UBW 23 warez 23 computing 12 JFD 23 hacking 23 history 23 software 23 internet security 01 06 03 00 When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and <italic>The Pirate Bay.</italic> These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media–music, videos, games, and software–before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free.<italic>Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy</italic> is the first scholarly book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites”) in the mid- to late-1990s. “The Scene,” as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term “Warez” itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of “software.” Taking a deep dive into the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, <italic>Warez</italic> describes the operations and infrastructures of an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within the positive ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy.Broad in scope and novel in its approach, <italic>Warez</italic> is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age. Dead Letter Office 01 punctum books 04 01 20211215 02 WORLD 06 15 9781685710361 06 15 9781685710378 WORLD 09 punctum books 20 01