Transnational Piracy Research in Practice: A Roundtable Interview with Joe Karaganis, John Cross, Olga Sezneva, and Ravi Sundaram

The past year has seen the release of a number of new studies on informal media circulation. Of these, the most far-reaching is the Social Science Research Council report Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, a 426-page analysis of pirate circuits in South Africa, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia and India. The product of a transnational team of researchers led by Joe Karaganis, this richly detailed study sheds new light on how movies, music and software circulate both inside and outside legal media markets. Its most compelling conclusion is that global piracy is, above all, a price problem: 'High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous' (2011: i). The report is significant for a number of reasons. Via a detailed critique of the existing body of industry-funded piracy research, it shifts the debate away from a 'revenue leakage' argument and toward a different set of questions concerning pricing, access and equity [see Figure 1]. Its account of the interactions between formal and informal media systems reveals how pirate and legal media circuits are intertwined in some of the world's most populous nations. And while generating many valuable insights for media scholars, the report speaks also to the policy field, providing information and data that can be used by policymakers, regulators and media companies as they confront a rapidly changing distribution landscape. We chatted with Karaganis and three key members of his team---Ravi Sundaram, Olga Sezneva, and John Cross---about this remarkable project, and about piracy research more broadly. As scholars with a longstanding interest in this area, Karaganis, Sundaram, Cross, and Sezneva are uniquely positioned to discuss some of the challenges of investigating pirate media circuits---problems of data, ethics, and logistics in multi-sited media research---as well as the analytical opportunities that arise from studying informal media economies.