The global phenomenon of media piracy, in which millions of fans participate daily and routinely, is usually investigated through the lenses of copyright infringement, financial impacts to media industries, and how Global South fans access Global North content. This lecture will focus on fans and pirates in the U.S. who are marginalized because of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and/or disability, and how they regard media piracy as a practice of information and cultural access that enables their familial and community relations as well as their very survival. While scholars such as Lawrence Lessig have defended pirate and remix practices as useful for allowing presumptively white, middle-class youth to learn important technical and creative skills, other theorists, such as Kavita Philip, have claimed that piracy must be valued beyond its utilitarian value to already-technologically- and culturally-privileged users. Drawing on my interviews with a number of Black, brown, Asian, queer, poor, and disabled pirates, I argue the “paywalling” of media contributes to large-scale structures of poverty and deprivation. I show that, through piracy, U.S. minorities insist on their rights to participate on equal footing in cultural scenes and to derive the maximum personal and collective benefits from those scenes regardless of their social statuses.