Piracy was my shot at equality

Piracy is not theft, let’s make this perfectly clear. Theft, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English, is “the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it”. Piracy, on the other hand, is the act of producing and distributing an (illegal) copy of a digital entity. Copying, see, does not have any implications on the original – it doesn’t modify or destroy it.

Now that I’ve led this big ethical elephant out if the room, I can tell you the story of how piracy enabled me to learn and effectively shaped me into who I am. Being Bulgarian, and born in the late 1980s, I had little access, if any, to high quality western cultural content when I was young. The decade after the fall of the Communist regime and the beginning of the “transition” to democracy and capitalism, the income of a working citizen averaged 35 US dollars. A month. You can understand then, why going to the cinema, buying music on “original” cassette tapes (let alone CDs) and using licensed software was not an option.

I was lucky enough to have a parent working in design, and owning an, even if somewhat outdated, desktop computer. And I wanted to do stuff with it. Like every teen, I wanted to play games, watch the Hollywood blockbusters and listen to all the hippest bands. I suppose there were a lot of people in my position, since the Bulgarian pirate scene really flourished.

So, admittedly, I pirated the shit out of western culture. Star Wars, The Shawshank Redemption, Half-Life, Nirvana, Adobe Creative Suite – I did it all. At a time and place where knowledge of western languages was the most precious asset and the state educational system was heavily lagging behind, I learned English at quite a decent level, at the cost of no more than my internet connection. To add to that, I acquired skills in using specialized software for design and video production, as well as knowledge about peer-to-peer networks.

Illustration by Banksy

But I was also shaped along the lines of the western values and lifestyle. I was immersed in American and British culture – something that later in life proved to be responsible for most of my educational, career and life choices. In effect, my personal “transition” from communism to democracy and capitalism was not a result of the political structure of my country, but, oddly enough, of the anarchistic ways of piracy. Thanks to it I caught up to the world, and now I stand on even ground with western civilization. Just as Lawrence Liang points out in his article “Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate”, piracy accomplished for me all the things the state and the educational system could not.