Being one of the most politically, economically, and culturally closed countries in the world, North Korea bans all distribution and consumption of foreign media in the country. Therefore, all foreign media are pirated media in North Korea. Despite the state sanction, it has been widely reported that most North Koreans have watched foreign films and television programmes from South Korea and the US (Ahmed, 2014; Yoon, 2015; Hajek, 2017; Baek, 2018). Unlike media piracy in other developing countries, illegal media files are not shared and consumed on the Internet, but smuggled into the country on storage devices such as USB drives. Also, unlike other developing countries, consumers of pirated media can be sentenced to death. The unique situation in North Korea calls for an examination of the material and corporeal aspects of media piracy.

The concept of materiality acknowledges that technologies that create, store, and play media files are not neutral because ‘the physical properties or features of objects and settings […] “invite” actors to use them in particular ways’ (Lievrouw, 2014: 23). To give an example, VCR players do not allow for easy rewinding and fast forwarding, which discourages users from doing so. The technologies with which media copies are produced also give a specific quality to the images. In the analogue era, the quality of pirated media was inferior because quality deteriorates with every dubbing; in the digital era, the quality remains the same even if the original is copied many times.

Corporeality also matters in the case of media piracy in North Korea. Corporeality refers to the physical form of an object, in this case the fleshy, material aspect of the human body. Unlike online media piracy, media piracy in North Korea requires the human bodies to smuggle the physical goods across borders. In this case, media pirates are more like drug smugglers who risk being arrested by bringing forbidden goods across borders. Once the goods are in North Korea, sellers have to hawk the storage devices loaded with media files in a physical space. In addition, since the distribution and consumption of foreign media is a punishable crime, the practice of media piracy brings forth the body that will experience physical pains during punishment.