[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The hillbilly with his jug of moonshine (marked xxx) is a familiar, if problematic caricature of southern life. figure has endured in part because it embodies so many tropes about South, both good and bad. There is criminality, ill health, and poverty; moonshiner engages in unlawful behavior to concoct a beverage of dubious safety, because he is too poor to drink anything but his own hooch. On positive side, though, one finds more favorable qualities: a spirited resistance to authority, for instance, not unlike image of South exemplified by Duke boys outsmarting Boss Hogg on popular television series The Dukes of Hazzard. The moonshiner is independent, making a product without state sanction and despite his evident lack of capital. He is masculine, because he is strong enough to stomach white lightning. Bootlegging is even bound up in mythology of an iconic southern industry and pastime, NASCAR racing, as sport originated among southerners who souped up their cars to move illicit booze and evade law enforcement. According to historian Mark D. Howell, these bootleggers soon became the subjects of regional folklore, whose stories embodied themes of self-reliance and personal economic survival. (1) The South has also been home to a less storied form of bootlegging: music. Although region saw little piracy of sound recordings prior to World War II, by 1960s South was emerging as a major center of pirate music production. Before, production of shellac and then vinyl discs had been highly centralized in pressing plants controlled by major record labels. The introduction of magnetic tape in United States during late 1940s offered a new and more flexible form of recording, but technology was used chiefly by broadcasters, recording studios, and a small number of high-fidelity enthusiasts at first. By 1960s, however, new media such as 8-track and compact cassette made recording and copying sound cheaper and easier for a wide range of consumers. Subsequently, media production decentralized and spread across nation, as everyone from self-described socialists to mere profiteers seized opportunity to reproduce and distribute sound recordings. North Carolina, in particular, saw numerous and repeated busts of tape bootlegging operations in 1970s. As federal government and record industry expanded their war on piracy, they discovered that small towns in South were connected to networks that spanned country, north to south and east to west. Even village that inspired Andy Griffith Show--the urtext of small town life in Tar Heel state--was raided by FBI in 1970s. (2) How South became a hub of bootleg media is part of a larger story of free-wheeling enterprise and political struggle over intellectual property. conflict gave rise to a powerful new regime of copyright enforcement in late twentieth century, which has been challenged in recent years by file-sharing networks, as well as legal activism of groups such as Creative Commons and Electronic Frontier Foundation. (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Long before Napster threatened music industry, though, a handful of southern lawyers and pirates resisted expansion of copyright in courts and press, ultimately to little avail. Record companies enjoyed a steady stream of legal and political victories during 1970s, but piracy never disappeared. This state is spawning more and more bootleg industries everyday, an FBI agent told reporters in 1978, surveying aftermath of a major bust of tape pirates in North Carolina. The state was still considered a center of pirate activity in 1983, according to Billboard, and pirate media remain widely available in venues such as flea markets in South. The production and sale of illicit music, like liquor, has been part of what late historian Jack Temple Kirby dubbed countercultural South--an undercurrent of defiance to both government and big business that persisted throughout twentieth century among poor and working-class southerners, epitomized by moonshine, fast cars, and music pirates alike. …