Lifting the Eyepatch: Business Models of Piracy

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to enable a better understanding of the professional piracy business by “lifting the eyepatch” of previous research approaches, which tackled the topic of maritime piracy with a one-eyed retrospective focus and by the self-imposed limitation of discounting pirates as desperate amateurs. To overcome this blind spot the illegal business models were approached from the perspective of a sophisticated criminal entrepreneur because this shift of view was believed to facilitate a more impartial examination of the underlying dynamics of piracy, providing further insights, which might have been overlooked in the past. Metaphorically speaking, in the course of this study, the applied methodology has been successfully revealing significant parts of the concealed treasure-map of piracy, which contains the “secret” core factors and processes determining the feasibility of the criminal businesses and thereby the ultimate rationale of the emergence of professional piracy per se.