Which program is pickling and why? That seems like a very strange thing to do in this situation. The only time to pickle something is if you need to represent a non-string object on disk, but Python ...
The fix for that issue was to have csvkit mention PYTHONIOENCODING in the message for an encoding error: Your file is not "utf-8" encoded. Please specify the correct encoding with the -e flag or with ...
We currently don't have a (good) example of how to write a tar archive using stdin - we have one for stdout.