In the process of researching and designing a social protocol for cinema circulation, we rapidly felt the necessity of discussing what is arguably the main alternative circuit of distribution for cinema: the buzzing reality of online “pirate” communities.

First, a methodological note: we dislike the derogatory connotation associated with the term piracy, perpetuated by state legal systems, and used to persecute people. And while this chapter makes use of piracy for understandability’s sake, we interpret this phenomenon as a form of civil disobedience challenging the monopolistic control of media distribution imposed by copyright laws. In this regard, something called piracy exists only as external to the fences of a situated, market-friendly understanding of intellectual property.

We have never been pirates

For more than two decades now, movies - so as music and e-books - have been distributed through a parallel online circuit outside the tight stitches of copyright laws. The size of this phenomenon is impressive: visits to online piracy websites reached 141 billion in 2023, accounting for an estimated 386 million visits every single day. That number marks a 12% increase since 2019, according to data provided by the piracy tracking firm MUSO.[2] The United States and India are the countries most affected by piracy, both with 11% of traffic, followed by Russia (6%) and the UK (3%).

Interestingly, pirate films and TV shows captivate 65% of these visits. One could be surprised by this growing trend: weren’t streaming platforms supposed to solve the issue of piracy, with their fatal combination of subscription model and overabundance of content? To understand piracy’s evolution - as well as to clarify the significance of the phenomenon for Meshdia - we must take a couple of steps back.

The trajectory of piracy moves alongside media history. When the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press in 1440, he ignited a revolution that led to the first wave of decentralization in the galaxy of the printed word, challenging the existing monopoly of the Roman Church. Gutenberg’s invention and subsequent evolutions made printing books more affordable, leading to a diffusion of presses around Europe. In this renewed media environment, book producers’ guilds assembled to establish a socio-political influence to control who could and could not publish books, influencing the emanation of new laws. Around 1680, owners of publishing presses started to call “pirates” those who ditched the registry of booksellers, marking the first use of the term in this context. As soon as the pirates appeared, accusations of theft of intellectual property followed promptly.[3]

Similarly, in the XX century, activists were called pirates when they hijacked the state monopoly on radio waves to transmit freely, as in the case of the Voice of Peace project. Also, home taping - the practice of recording songs from the radio on tape - was considered an act of piracy and theft against musicians and record labels, famously encapsulated in the British Phonographic Industry’s motto Home Taping is Killing Music.[4]

An artifact remembering the music industry’s war against home taping.

So since Modernity, piracy has followed a common pattern: a new media is invented or it emerges, challenging existing forms of distribution and shaping practices that move into alegal realms; the media distributors and the lawmakers label these new forms of exchange as illegal and “pirate” and they try to stop the phenomena by creating new legal and economical enclosures.

But it is only with the diffusion of the Internet that media piracy becomes a mass phenomenon. A symbolic date for this mutation is the 1st of July, 1999, the day of Napster’s release. Napster was a peer-to-peer file-sharing service, that grew extremely popular and was used mostly for sharing music in the form of MP3, a recently invented form of audio compression. Although forced to close by authorities in 2001 (due to issues with copyright law), Napster pollinated the Internet with a new template for media distribution that produced many successful heirs like Soulseek, SciHub, Library Genesis, Anna’s Archive, Karagaraga, rutracker, and more.

This fluctuation between mass adoption and legal crackdown characterizes the story of online piracy up to the present day. According to legislative systems, piracy is equivalent to theft and pirate websites are takedown daily, with their founders condemned to different convictions, including jail.[5] In response to this, pirate communities adopted an array of different strategies, favoring obscurity and a general stealth approach to avoid the gaze of law enforcement: invite-only communities, multiplication of domains, etc.

The stranglehold against piracy is often pushed not by individual artists and creators, as we may imagine, but by the “publishers, record labels, movie studios, and other intermediaries who rose to market dominance in the 20th century”.[6] These cartels and lobbies of media distributors are actively influencing the lawmaking process on behalf of their interests and not in defense of artists.

This influence finds its legal pillar in the principles of copyright laws, which are themselves a byproduct of publishers' and distributors’ vested interests. Rather than to safeguard the creative autonomy or intellectual property rights of authors, these laws were designed to suppress competition and maintain monopolistic control, starting with the aforementioned printing industry and the exemplary Statute of Anne, promulgated in 1710 in England. Also known as the Copyright Act of 1710, the Statute was the first copyright law enacted in the country and it established the concept of copyright as a legal right of the author. However, by granting exclusive printing and distribution rights to publishers for a limited period, the statute extended their control over literary works without adequately addressing authors' rights or ensuring fair compensation.

Through the centuries, these laws have calcified in our societies with the claim of protecting the natural rights of artists. In reality, they mostly still defend the commercial interests of the market-makers. We will dissect the idea of copyright in greater detail in the subsequent chapter. For now, let’s briefly mention a notably egregious case where copyright laws have hindered knowledge dissemination in society: academic research. The circulation of some of its most significant efforts is severely limited by issues of intellectual property and the absurd pricing policy attached to it. This approach obstacles the dissemination of scientific research among academics and in society, creating imbalances of power as only richer institutions can guarantee access to their fellows. In opposition to this copyright-bounded reality, stands a pirate initiative like SciHub, courageously brought on by the Khazaki programmer and activist Alexandra Elbakya. Interviewed in 2015, Elbakyan gave a shimmering argument against the equivalence of theft and piracy:

“ [...] In our Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, there are separate articles 158, ‘Theft’, and 146, ‘Infringement of copyright and related rights’. [...] Why come up with different laws for the same crime? So, piracy, or infringement of copyright, is not legally equivalent to theft. Piracy is essentially copying information. When information is copied, it grows larger. If you have a book and I make a copy of it, there will be two books. Copying is the production of new items. Not so with theft. If I steal a book from you, there is still only one book. Moreover, in this case, you will lose your book. With copying, the owner is not deprived of their owned object – on the contrary; with stealing, one is deprived. Through copying, new consumer goods are produced; in stealing, they are not. [...] A well-known saying, attributed to the Buddha, states: ‘Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and its life will not become shorter. Happiness does not become less when you share it’. We can add that information does not become less when it is copied. On the contrary, it gets bigger. Piracy is production! (and in the case of Sci-Hub it’s a fairly complex and high-tech production). Therefore, arguments are sought to equate computer piracy to theft. It should be understood that this is a banal game of words and political rhetoric.”

Initiatives like Sci-Hub are laboratories for experimentation with different modes of circulation and exist as havens in a growing privatized Web. Following Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Simon Worthington,[7] the evolution of Internet itself in the last decades resembles the pattern we previously described: a reaction of the media companies against the free spaces opened by online pirates and peer-to-peer communities.

Napster, for instance, was contrasted firstly with the release of Apple’s iTunes, a vast e-shop for music tracks and albums, and, later on, by Spotify, which is directly inspired by Napster and similarly offered a massive collection of music. Indeed Spotify, with its user-friendly interface, transitioned users towards paid subscriptions for content that Napster previously offered for free. Certainly, the Swedish company didn’t do that in favor of artists, who are notoriously impoverished by the streaming services models. Conversely, major labels' profits broke records in the past few years, rebounding from the decline that began precisely with the release of Napster in ‘99. The digital commons, which emerged through the Internet breakthrough, got progressively enclosed and their network wealth re-distributed to the major distributors.

Moving from music to moving images, one further factor probably played a relevant role in the recently surging popularity of piracy websites: the emergence of the so-called Streaming Wars between 2019 and 2023. This journalistic term was coined to describe a period of intensified competition between video streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Max, Disney+, Paramount+, Apple TV+, and so on, which peaked during the pandemic years when audience engagement appeared to be continuously rising. It’s not in our interest to determine who won this commercial competition, but it’s worth observing what kind of landscape left behind in 2024. The proliferation of video platforms fragmented collections and walled content behind policies of exclusivity, forcying viewers to subscribe to multiple streaming platforms if they want to catch up with their favorite content. Meanwhile, platforms have become more hostile towards user practices such as password sharing and continued to raise subscription prices. In an increasingly predatory market, it seems logical for more and more people to turn to pirate practice, ignoring its criminalizing frame.

In this brief overview, we tried to contextualize the historical importance of “piracy” and the necessity of adopting certain systems in light of predatory and monopolistic choices from big distributors, sustained by national legal systems. Stories like Sci-Hub are interpretable as forms of civil disobedience: breaking unjust laws to contrast ridiculously expensive market policies to sustain the free dissemniation of knowledge and equal right to research.

After this clarification, we can turn our attention to two situated stories that are instructive for the future design of of Meshdia’s Possible Cinema Protocol. They show the power of community in file sharing systems and reveal often overlooked modes of interaction with films. Moreover, they will help us to further pull apart the claims of the copyright system, showing us different understanding of intellectual property.

The Black Crow: The Case of Karagarga[8]

Karagarga - Turkish for black crow - is one of the most interesting cases of an international community organized around a system of file sharing. Active since the early 2000s, Karagarga is a members-only online forum, BitTorrent[9] tracker, and file-sharing archive used primarily for sharing and downloading films. Karagarga is specialized “in art-house, alternative, cult, and classic movies”[10] and it explicitely prohibits the upload of Hollywood or Bollywood movies. Among many treasures, one can find prized movies such as Manoel de Oliveira’s “Doomed Love”, Robert Bresson’s “A Gentle Woman”, and Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear”. Through time, Karagarga started to accept also music and books, maintaining similar rules of conduct for these other media.

The preservation and diffusion of this historical material are crucial for many movies, that exist only in one copy due to the rapid evolution of media support (tape, VHS, DVD, blue-ray, etc.). One note on preservation: as by writer Glyn Moody,[11] the loss of movies is not only ascribable to technical obsolescence but also caused by copyright. Put simply, despite recognizing the vulnerability of movies to copying, intellectual property laws prevent individuals from creating duplicates of these artifacts.

How does Karagarga work? Initially, to access Karagarga, one must receive an invitation from a member. These invitations are limited, granted solely to active community participants, and restricted to once annually. The participation is measured through an individual ratio, an average proportion of movies uploaded and movies downloaded. The ratio gives access to a certain “download amount”, a quantity of files that can be downloaded: for instance, to download between 100 GB and 200 GB, one requires a ratio of 0.5. Members can improve their ratio by completing actions like re-seeding a torrent[12] or satisfying another member’s request. Conversely, filling these requests will cost points to the members, so that they can’t abuse certain functions. Moreover, a movie is offered daily from Karagarga and its download doesn’t influence one’s ratio.

Members can also contribute with fan-subbing to Karagara: the website is often one of the few (if not the only) resources for watching important movies in languages in which they were never translated. It’s hard to overestimate this aspect: subtitles are one of the main vectors of circulation for cinema and the active community of Karagara provides the world with precious translations. Channeling the ‘Social Cinephilia’ manifesto produced during Think Well 4, we see how Karagarga’s members’s cinephilia becomes a vector of conviviality and generosity and a method “to find ways out” for films, echoing their force in different cultures. Karagarga’s long-lasting influence is encapsulated in one episode recently reported by TorrentFreak.[13] Turner Classic Movie - an American movie-oriented pay-TV network- recently screened the Spanish classic movie “The Garden of Delights”. Since the movie is only available in its original language, it needed subtitles: yet, even on a Warner Bros’ owned TV the subtitles were actually produced on Karagarga, as showed by the end credits.

Continuing our analysis, we see how Karagarga offers also a curatorial program - called “Master of the Month” (MOM) - that highlights a collection of a cinematic historical period, enriched with books and music related to the works. The MOM program is an educational tool self-organized by members and coordinated by Karagarga’s staff, allowing film enthusiasts to learn about particular moments in history like “Action cinema from South East Asia” or movies in the “European debt crisis”.[14] Next to this system of sharing, an online forum - which preserves its 2000s Internet aesthetics - is active and used to discuss films, music, and books but also to share requests and coordinate the preservation of Karagarga’s archive.

The case of Karagarga shows how a “pirate” community can become relevant for an entire artistic form. Karagarga became one the most important digital archives for “non-mainstream” movies and it’s extraordinarily maintained by a community of cinephiles coordinated only through a set of rules and a manifesto. Their strict policy of access, although exclusive, worked to maintain the community secure enough to avoid legal crackdowns.

The system of contribution, backed by the cinephile desire to access more movies, incentivizes new approaches to the movies, like the creation and sharing of fansubs, or the possibility of helping another fan watching the movie by re-seeding the torrent. It is a real testament to the power of non-profit-oriented incentive structures and their ability to create a different value system.

We believe that only by allowing for different forms of interaction with movies we can establish an alternative circulation system for this art. Meshdia must channel the cinephile’s labor of love in a social protocol - Possible Cinema Protocol - that formalizes new forms of sharing, from the gift to the direct exchange, disseminating movies around the world.

Finally, let us conclude with an anecdote that can stir our imagination about our protocol's future. In 2023, Travis Wilkerson, a celebrated American independent film director, shared his new movie “The Fuckee’s Hymn” on Karagarga, withdrawing it from the film festivals circuit. Wilkerson explained in the forum post that this decision is an homage to Karagarga itself, defined as “the single most influential presence on my current knowledge and practice in filmmaking.”.

It’s inspiring to see renowned artists ditching the verticality of the usual distribution circuits to join an alternative circulation system powered by film lovers; MeshMedia aims to inspire similar acts of mutiny from the unfairness of the film industry, allowing artists to try an unexplored path.

Words over images: the case of Bilibili

We will now follow Zhen Troy Chen’s analysis of Bilibili.com, a Chinese video platform, and its embedding of the idea of Shanzai, to disclose a drastically different approach to creativity and a practical critique of the ideas of copyright.

The term Shanzai (山寨) denoted fortified mountain forts and strongholds, typically found in regions beyond the control of imperial governance. Over time, particularly during the Song dynasty (960–1279), it evolved to describe bands of outlaws who resisted and eluded corrupt officials to carry out what they deemed righteous acts. Although belonging to a different setting, shanzai can be compared to Western maritime pirates: libertarians existing at the margins of society and perpetuating their unique way of living at every cost.

In the early 00s, as China became the biggest manufacturing country in the world, shanzai started to be used as a derogatory word for counterfeit products and knock-off electronic devices, purchased by people coming from rural areas. The shanzai approach is present also in the circulation of media in China, where pirate CDs (dakou CDs), DVDs (region 9 DVD), and videogames flooded the country in the 00s. This "pirate" distribution facilitated the dissemination of Western media before receiving official authorization, often circumventing bans imposed by authorities. Furthermore, the piracy circuits led to the development and broader diffusion of VPNs, which are used today to bypass the Chinese Great Firewall and navigate the Web without governmental limitiations.

“In the early years of the 21st century, China arguably possessed the most developed and complete film archives in the world. If you were patient enough, any film from any country could be found in the corner video shop – it was like a no-man’s-land of images. Pirate disc vendors and buyers also formed a unique alliance and established an alternative underground distribution and circulation network for pirated films.”[15]

The Chinese conception of shanzai, nonetheless, not only affects the distribution of media but also shapes how the public interacts with and manipulates them. Shanzai is an attitude that challenges Western assumptions on the sacred immutability of the work of art and the role of individual genius in embracing a potentially infinite remix and re-appropriation of existing artistic tropes. This concept animates the spirit of the video platform Bilibili.

Bilibili is a user-generated video platform founded in 2009 by Xu Yi inspired by existing Japanese fan-video platforms like AcFun. The name Bilibili comes also from the fandom culture, as it is a nickname for the protagonist Mikoto Misaka in the anime A Certain Scientific Railgun. The platform hosts a significant amount of user-generated content, including fan-made videos, fan edits, parodies, and other derivative works based on copyrighted material such as anime, manga, video games, and movies. However, it’s not uncommon to find freely accessible popular anime series on the platforms. Bilibli, especially in its early years, became a space for the Chinese youth and the fandom subculture. The pirate spirit of shanzhai challenges the notion of authenticity and originality that are rooted in Western mentality. Derivative artworks are the most popular content on Bilibli, expressing a participative approach different from passive viewership.

The most distinctive function of Bilibili is another manifestation of shanzai: the idea of bullet comments, also known as danmu, or danmaku (Chinese: 弹幕). Danmaku are live users’ comments overlaid on top of the video, that can be personalized in their visual style, format, and motion. The term danmaku originally connotates an arcade game genre: a vertical shooter game where players guide a spaceship through spectacular explosions and optical mirageries.[16] The baroque visual experience of these games inspired a way of sharing comments and subtitles in the Japanese video sharing community, specifically with the platform Niconico “The comments will be "shot" onto the screen in a “bullet curtain” likeness, and will be reproduced and displayed in accordance with the time axis thereafter. The comments go beyond real-time, with previous and later comments being shown together.”.[17]

Bilibili, and other Chinese websites, popularized this practice making it accessible to millions of users. The platform offers users a deeper customization tool using its API, allowing dynamic change of danmaku comments and even the possibility of drawing shapes on screen. This feature is a symptom of a playful and interactive approach to the moving image, that allows for the creation of a shared context where different voices intersect with the flow of the video.

With danmaku, user comments have usurped the spotlight, becoming the focal point of video content itself, and viewers’ direct engagement often surpasses mere watching. Danmaku is related to the practice of fansubbing popular on systems like Karagarga: they both share an “amateur, free, unregulated and even illegal” character and they are the product of bottom-up (sub)cultures intersecting with mainstream media products. China saw a proliferation of pirate fansub communities, which played a particularly prominent role in spreading Western movies and TV shows.

But danmaku goes one step further, by shuffling the semiotic hierarchies among the work and the viewer, through a videogame-inspired approach that privileges interactivity over passivity. Instead of admiring works from a distance, users on Bilibili treat their favorite works of fiction as proper opere aperte (open works)[18]: a malleable canvas that can be tweaked by and shaped into many new different forms. The original work is honored and expanded upon, weaving together new dimensions through participative intertextuality.

Summing up, the Chinese concept of shanzai challenges the Western philosophical ideas - the aura of the artwork, the primacy of authenticity, etc. - that underlie the legal framework of copyright. Moving beyond the frame of piracy as civic disobedience, shanzai reveals a different ontological understanding of creativity and authoriality. Specifically through the practice of danmaku, viewers assume an active role, developing a new mode of interaction with videos, by juxtaposing their words and comments with the video flow. Moving into the interstices of the artwork, danmaku reveals which other exchanges and conversations a work of art can stimulate. The joyous anarchic nature of this practice should be acknowledged as we strive to redefine the interaction space with movies with Meshdia, instantiating alternative pathways for their circulation.