Over the last decade piracy has become a source of constant debate. While copyright organisations describe piracy as simple theft, others regard it as a legitimate form of cultural consumption in a digital environment. Piracy is, however, not a phenomenon unique to digital media of the 21st century. This article takes the history of copyright and piracy as a starting point for a discussion about piracy as a cultural and political phenomenon that goes beyond the contemporary preoccupation with particular piratical practices such as file sharing. It seeks to show how copyright and piracy are integrated aspects of modern society, equally situated in the urban, social space of the modern city and the global, geopolitical landscape of colonialism in the past and the present. One might call it a study of how piracy is constituted in space over time.

The article sets out with a short overview of the colonial heritage of copyright, followed by a discussion of the re-contextualisation of copyright within the structures of international trade relations in the 1990s, moving on to discuss how this positioned piracy within a postcolonial order of power. It concludes with a brief discussion of how piracy has become an integrated part of everyday life in contemporary, postcolonial cities and how this development reflects piracy’s role in the process of late capitalist globalisation.