Piracy culture as a concept is organized around a series of widely accepted facts: for example, that copyright infringements are widespread, that the entertainment industries have to do something about this, and that ordinary users wanting a share of "remix" culture are getting caught up in this. This article accepts that "Read/Write" culture is a useful formulation and then seeks to remap the relationships among key agents in piracy culture as a field of specific practices. It is suggested that several mutually dependent fantasies lock these agents together. Recent research on technical activities in the area of filesharing reveals what this article characterizes as a deliberate poisoning of the affective economy on which both "piracy" and a creative "Read/Write" culture depend, and the article detects quantitative evidence that this phenomenon has been widespread.