It’s widely assumed that digital piracy holds the potential of subverting the capitalist model of cultural production and distribution because it undermines the tight control of the circulation of intellectual products by the copyright industry and embodies a mentality of information communism. However, the facts that digital piracy of music has actually facilitated the institutional transformation of the global music industry and that (digital) piracy of movies in mainland China has served insidiously as an agent for Hollywood’s ambition towards global cultural hegemony expose the illusionary nature of digital piracy’s potential of cultural resistance, which in turn informs the necessity of distancing from the consumerist space maintained by the copyright system and its discursive practice of power. Only by totally abandoning the conception of private ownership in the arena of knowledge and cultural production and dissemination and turning to a model based on a conception of digital commons can the utopia of information freedom imagined by digital pirates obtain self-sustaining moral justification and practical feasibility.