In order to understand the dynamics and inner workings of piracy, I conducted fieldwork in the summer of 2011 by becoming a participant-observer at three pirate DVD shops in Hanoi, Vietnam. Like many foreigners who rarely experience piracy in such an open and material environment, I was initially amazed and intrigued by these stores’ massive accumulation of media texts. But as I began to normalize myself within the pirate shop, my focus expanded beyond just the media itself, but also started to include how the store and media incorporated themselves in the customers’ lives. During my time at these stores, I met Vietnamese directors and actors trying to find films to study and librarians from local universities buying hundreds of discs for their library collections. I watched a crowd of 15 strangers gather around a television in a store to laugh over an episode of Mr. Bean. I overheard informal reviews of films that customers brought last week and debates over which film was the best in The Fast and the Furious franchise. I heard sounds of excitement as a film finally came to the store, as well as rants about the lack of films.

As my experiences illustrate, in the context of many developing nations such as Vietnam, “pirate and grey-market practices have been vectors not only of ‘consumption’ in a narrow sense but also of cultural participation, education, and innovation” (Liang and Sundaram 2011, 344). Pirated media texts in Vietnam are not just for entertainment, but are educating the current and next generation of filmmakers and media consumers. Within a context like Vietnam, it is helpful to look at the works of Lawrence Liang (2005) and Ravi Sundaram (2010), which approaches piracy as a form of access and focuses on everyday forms of piracy and consumption (physical DVDs, clothing, electronics, etc.) that commonly exist on the fringes of global society. This framework of “piracy as access” is interested in the transformative properties of piracy and how it can distribute knowledge, culture, and capital in areas where official infrastructures are lacking (Lobato 2012, 82). The act of piracy, Liang argues, is not necessarily just about morals or an act of resistance, but one out of necessity in many developing countries.