Piracy On The Ground: How Informal Media Distribution and Access Influences The Film Experience in Contemporary Hanoi, Vietnam
Piracy On The Ground: How Informal Media Distribution and Access Influences The Film Experience in Contemporary Hanoi, Vietnam
Piracy On The Ground: How Informal Media Distribution and Access Influences The Film Experience in Contemporary Hanoi, Vietnam
CMCT6002
March 26th, 2017
Selected Article:
Tran, T. (2015). Piracy on the Ground: How Informal Media Distribution and Access Influences
the Film Experience in Contemporary Hanoi, Vietnam. In T. Baumgärtel (Ed.), A Reader
in International Media Piracy: Pirate Essays (51- 80). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press.
Relevance
The most pressing emergent questions in my own research surrounding piracy and the
communities of practice which exist around file-sharing are ethical considerations of how to
study a community that is potentially vulnerable due to the contested, and in many cases outright
illegal, nature of their actions. Not all pirates are necessarily criminals and not all pirates are
necessarily vulnerable, but considering that the undetermined nature of pirates’ identities is
attempt to build an ethics-led approach into my investigation. Of equal value are tactics to
approach a community that for the same reasons might be distrustful of outsiders, and skittish
when faced with classic research methods like interviews and surveys.
I chose Tony Tran’s (2015) piece, “Piracy on the Ground: How Informal Media
Distribution and Access Influences the Film Experience in Contemporary Hanoi, Vietnam,” to
critique because it too is concerned with pirates and piracy communities, albeit ones centred
around the material practice of trading tangible pirated products, i.e. DVDs. Although shops
selling pirated DVDs are subject to limited policing in Vietnam, and the Global South more
generally, they are nevertheless still involved in an illegal trade and subject to occasional, but
highly mediatized, raids (Baumgärtel, 2015). As such, they can be considered a vulnerable
community. Tran’s paper is the result of a participant-observation study on shops selling pirated
DVDs in Hanoi, Vietnama different approach to my future research, which will be conducted
virtually for the most part, but one that could nevertheless have very important pointers on both
the ethics of pirate observation and applicability of various research methods and tactics.
Methodology
interviews with pirate shop owners and workers, and observed the consumption habits of the
stores’ customers. Although it is not entirely clear how many shops these interviews and
observations were conducted in, there is some implication in the paper that the fieldwork
extended beyond the three shops where Tran was also employed, working four hour shifts
multiple times a week, alternating between morning, afternoon, and evening shifts. As an
employee, Tran received informal work training from full-time and part-time coworkers, the
latter of which he notes were often university student. His sales duties included locating specific
titles for customers, plugging new releases1, answering customer questions (often regarding film
audio-visual quality), pricing for customers and testing media on in-store tech. Some in-store
tasks Tran observed only; selecting films from suppliers, taking inventory for restocking, and
An immediately evident feature of Tran’s research method, especially for someone reading
with the intent of attempting to replicate his study to some degree, is the lack of clarity regarding
his fieldwork and operationalized definitions. Bernard (2011) argues that lack of control is one of
1
There is an extended, and very interesting, discussion within the paper on the exact meaning of “new”.
the benefits of informal and unstructured interviewing, as it allows for a more subject-led
research process, one which might reveal otherwise overlooked themes or information. Tran
emphasizes several times that his interview process is informal, and there are clues throughout
the paper that he is taking an iterative approach, allowing incoming data to influence his process
in a feedback cycle. For example, Tran wonders about the influence which shop owners have on
the selection of films available; this begins by noting customers sometimes have specific
requests, asking shop owners how they determine their selection, noting the power suppliers
have when purchasing from pirate sources/producers, and further noting that shop owners
actually have little influence over what gets pirated in the first place (pp. 59-61).
While this hermeneutic approach seems effective when dealing with an infrastructure as
necessarily fluid and adaptive as the pirate production-consumption cycle, the lack of
operationalized definitions leaves many unanswered questions. How many shop owners and
employees did Tran talk to, and how strong was consensus on various answers? When he says
“they all replied ‘no’” (pp. 57) or “[a]s far as the store owners and workers I interviewed were
concerned…” (pp. 58) what does that mean, exactly? What distinguishes a full-time employee
from a part time employee in these shops, and which category did Tran fall intodid it have an
influence on his insider/outsider status at the shops? Tran mentions that many of the employees
were cinephiles – in this context, what does “many” mean, or even “cinephile”? Did Tran ask
about love of movies as part of his informal interview process with his coworkers? As already
mentioned, an unstructured, iterative approach seems tactful and appropriate when approaching
the pirate community. With that in mind, Tran’s process might nevertheless have benefitted from
a slightly more investigative and enumerative approach, to ground the very naturalistic,
embedded ethnographic approach he seems to have taken. This is not to say that Tran’s study
should have been filled with identifying minutiaas Gobo (2008) points out, it is easy to get lost
in the sheer quantity of observable facts. However, it is for this very reason that it is useful for
ethnographersand sociological studies in generalto define “not only what to observe, but
also how to do so.” (Gobo, 2008, pp. 2, emphasis original). The “how” is lacking from Tran’s
study, obscured by the emphasis he put on embedding himself in the situation he was studying.
A brief return to Bernard (2011), who notes that deception is often a part of informal
interviewing, to keep the subjects unaware of the researcher’s role. Tran clearly engaged in this
kind of deception, writing that “[a]s a person of Vietnamese descent, I was mostly able to pass as
a worker,” (2015, pp. 62) and that he spoke minimally (“yes” and “no” answers) and wore
clothing purchased in Vietnam. Although he does not go into detailed descriptions of shop
locations, Tran does directly quote several customers (pp. 70-72) and names one of his
employers (pp. 71-72). Although Tran does describe himself as being “on the outside” (pp. 63) in
regard to the intimate knowledge which workers have of the shops’ layout, he does not
disclosure whether or not his employers and coworkers were aware of his role as a researcher, or
if he ever gained their consent to be studied and quoted. While this is not best ethical practice,
especially regarding a potentially vulnerable community (Ali & Kelly, 2004), it is possible that
Tran did obtain this consent but did not mention it in his paper, or that he decided the study
would be impossible to carry out without deception, and instead concealed identities as best he
could as a mitigating factor. This, however, is speculation on my part, as the paper itself suffers
design itself, this essay reveals how piracy helps to shape and influence media experiences and
cultures in Hanoi,” (Tran, 2015, pp. 53). Although I chose this paper for its relevance to my
study of internal pirate culture, Tran is just as interested in piracy’s external influence as its
internal workings. While this is not an uncommon tactic for piracy studies, what is unique about
Tran’s argument is his focus on piracy as an informal media distribution system that is
necessitated by limited access to legal media goods in low-income countriesin this case,
Vietnam specifically. Tran posits piracy as “a realistic strategy for survival and innovation” (pp.
52), arguing that it is the only way for many living on the global fringes to access global culture.
While there were issues of clarity and disclosure regarding the actual research design of his
participant-observation, Tran’s work was ultimately invaluable for framing the Vietnamese
pirate shop as a scaled model of global media distribution, demonstrating how the pirate
routinely framed as global, implied to be accessible to all. Tran cautions that piracy is not a
perfect or neutral solution to this unequal access, and as a distribution system has its own
impacts on media consumption. The degraded sensorial experience often implicit in pirated
products, for example, can paradoxically distances audiences from the global media culture they
While this paper provided less of the direct method applicability than I’d hoped it would, it
was immensely valuable for opening up considerations of pirate identities and structures in non-
North American and European contexts, where much of my research has been focused so far. My
own research will be enriched by this broadened geopolitical perspective, and my critiques of
clarity and disclosure in Tran’s piece serve as a reminder to focus on these elements in the
Bibliography
Ali, S., & Kelly, M. (2004). Ethics and social research. In C. Seale (Ed.), Researching Society
and Culture. SAGE.