Culture Wide Closed: Pirate Monopolies, Forum Dictatorship and Nationalism in the Practice of File sharing

Abstract

Who gains from free culture and who is excluded from it? This paper analyses the case of the two most popular torrent trackers in Bulgaria in order to understand how the global movement to revise copyright and crush monopolies becomes a mere instrument in the hands of private monopolists in the Bulgarian context. We also examine how the vital cause of Internet freedom and free culture becomes entangled with anti-minorities protests. We claim that there is always an outside to the network, and in order to find out where this ‘outside’ lies, we have to consider the social and historical contexts in which the culture of sharing is embedded.