Pirates and Proprietary Rights: Perceptions of ‘Ownership’ and Media Objects Within Filesharing Communities

Who killed Utopia? Cult conspiracy drama and a television imaginary

“…In line with the discussion of piracy in the context of formal and informal media economies by Lobato and Thomas (2015), and research on piracy and cult media (Crisp, 2017), audiences and fans for Utopia connected with the drama via piracy sites, often re-watching through official channels and buying the box sets. They deliberately shifted from a distribution platform that disallows industry surveillance to one that counts them in ratings systems.…”

“…This television imaginary, where we see what Utopia is in terms of existing cultural meanings for broadcast television and national audiences, and what it might be as a cultural resource for internet television and transnational audiences and fans, feeds into various socio-technical imaginaries circulating at the time of the cancellation of the series (Valaskivi and Sumiala, 2014). Such imaginaries include discourses of piracy and a digital commons, as we have seen in the audience and fan discussions (Crisp, 2017); the perceived threat of internet audio-visual content to traditional, legacy media such as television, as we have seen in the producer discussions (Johnson, 2019); and the symbolic power of the future imaginary in the drama setting the scene for conspiracy theories of environmental catastrophe, as we have seen in the performance of future imaginaries by audiences and fans (Powers, 2020).…”