Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date

2023

Date of Award

4-11-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Sociology

Committee Chair

Carol Rambo

Committee Member

Clayton Fordahl

Committee Member

Gretchen Peterson

Abstract

For this study, 22 people over 18 years of age who illicitly downloaded media, sometimes called ‘pirates,’ were interviewed to explore how they accounted for their behavior and their communities. They claimed poverty, convenience, habit, archiving, and fun as their primary motivations for piracy. A Pirate Bill of Rights is proposed to represent foundational ethics from which many participants drew their basic moral and ethical assumptions. James C. Scott’s transcript theory is used to frame how pirates perceive domination and how piracy acts as a form of resistance against it. The concepts of the ‘pirate other’ and the ‘corporate other’ are coined here to describe how pirates perceive interaction with both the piracy community and with a dominant class since modern mass communication technologies alienate actual interaction with dominating actors.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest

Notes

Open Access

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