Olivia Dziwak

CMCT6002
March 26th, 2017

Article Method Critique

Piracy on the Ground: How Informal Media Distribution and Access
Influences the Film Experience in Contemporary Hanoi, Vietnam

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

generative of many of my research questions, I feel that extreme precaution is necessary as I

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, Vietnama 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

Tran’s participant-observation took place in Hanoi, where he conducted informal

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

basic cash duties.

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 intodid 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 minutiaas 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

ethnographersand sociological studies in generalto 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

yet again from a lack of clarity in this regard.

Argument and Broader Context

 “By exploring interactions between media texts, store workers, customers, and the store’s

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 countriesin 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

production-consumption cycle is a response to unequal access to media that is otherwise

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

are consuming, even as it enables their participation in it.

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

development of my own research design.

Bibliography

Ali, S., & Kelly, M. (2004). Ethics and social research. In C. Seale (Ed.), Researching Society
and Culture. SAGE.

Baumgärtel, T. (Ed.). (2015). A Reader in International Media Piracy: Pirate Essays.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Bernard, R. (2011). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative

Approaches (5th ed.). Lanham: AltaMira Press.

Gobo, G. (2008). Doing ethnography. SAGE.