 Hello, my name is Boudou Balazs and I'm working at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. And I would like to tell you about the research I've done in the last three years about illegal file-sharing communities. In the last few years, there has been a growing academic interest in the illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing scene. This interest is due to the intensity of copyright wars, the accelerating transformation of cultural markets, and the sheer ubiquity of the phenomenon. The bulk of this research is anchored in economic and business literature and tries to understand the impact of illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing on various markets and industries. The other discipline that has extensively discussed legal file-sharing is legal studies. In the era of the Napster and Grokster cases, especially when the legal status of file-sharing technologies was in question, file-sharing became closely linked to discussions of IP policy and copyright reform. Only a few studies and those predominantly from developing countries tried to read copyright piracy as a social practice and explore the unauthorized uses of intellectual properties in a wider socio-cultural complex. In these accounts, the unauthorized reproduction and dissemination of copyright protected cultural goods situated within the everyday practices of various social groups and the questions it raises are related to the issues of development and mobility, modernization, participation, social cohesion and cooperation. Similar studies that examined the non-legal, non-economic aspects of participating in file-sharing networks are yet to emerge in Western contexts. This gap in literature was the primary factor behind my research. My aim is to look beyond the legal and economic readings of contemporary Western copyright piracy and understand it as a unique social practice that merits attention not only because of its dubious legality, ubiquity or the havoc it has played with copyright-based business models, but first and foremost because it shapes the ideas and attitudes of millions of netizens about what intellectual property is and could be what sharing and online cooperation means in a peer-to-peer setting, what privacy is and how it can be protected, how to form and negotiate online identities in an anonymous environment just to name a few issues. Piracy is not just a drain on cultural economy, but a powerful productive force whose legacy in social relations will stay with us long after the economic conditions that called it into being and the power vacuum that enabled it have passed. The notion that piracy is more than just a legally contested shadow economy is further supported by the body of research that documents historical examples of copyright piracy either from a social media history, literary studies perspective or from a legal history standpoint. These historical accounts of copyright piracy describe the internal norms of information markets both before and after the establishment of national and international layers of regulation. The faces, the motivations and the fates of the copyright pirates are many but there is only one thing that is common in all of them that they all exist in the extra-legal domain at the edges of state authority. In this semi-autonomous space, honor among thieves or synthetic copyrights and freezing the registry of the stationers company, server-inforced share ratios and other non-legal structures organized by radical activities. In each and every case we find norms that while competing with the legal act to encourage the production of a common pool resource, offer methods to settle disputes and limit pre-riding. In other words, these bottom-up norms sometimes substitute, sometimes replicate the state's sanctioned layers of regulation that are missing or being denied. Why is the study of these emerging norms especially interesting today? There are at least three reasons for that. First, even though on paper we have seen a study in strengthening of the protection of intellectual properties, the inability to enforce them resulted in a significantly weaker copyright protection than any time during the last 100 years. That vacuum is partly caused, partly fueled by the competing bottom-up norms of fashioning communities. The weakened property rights along with the emergence of fashioning networks created a de facto common pool of resources from the musical, audiovisual, textual works circulating in the digital underground. These commons has proved to be quite resilient to attacks from the outside as well as from those internal issues that can lead to a tragedy of the commons. Many fashioning communities seem to have successfully solved the problems of managing a common pool of resource as well as protecting it from, in this case, the enclosure. There is, however, little to no research on the actual mechanisms of how these commons are maintained, protected and replenished. Second, even from the existing accounts it is evident that non-monetary incentives and complex social motivations play a crucial role in the existence and successful survival of fashioning communities and of those resource pools around which these communities gather. Beyond the technologically enforced compulsory rules, informal community norms encourage voluntary cooperation. Third, none of the subtle differences between different pirate communities is described with the current economic and legal language used to discuss copyright piracy despite the fact that they have profound economic and legal consequences on legal markets and, in general, copy norms alike. Current discourse on copyright piracy tends to homogenize a wide variety of fundamentally different practices with reductionist legal and economic arguments. Following the footsteps of Larry Lessig, I hope that the time is now ripe to step beyond the monolithic understanding of peer-to-peer fashioning by enriching the currently fragmented research landscapes with a social sciences-based piracy research. A piracy research that describes the government structures of different fashioning communities, that studies the different cooperation methods required to maintain an illegal information commons, and that finally situates these findings in a comparative framework that includes historical practices of extra-legal self-regulation. This is the TAP regulation of information markets. Thank you for your attention.