Introduction: Cinema and Piracy (original) (raw)
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Piracy in the media is a complex phenomenon linked to various ideas of art, ethics, community and legality. This paper will trace my experience in exploring piracy in various frameworks and contexts; the possible identities of the pirate as someone engaged in the phenomenon, including the criminal, the philanthropist, and the artist; the link between these identities and media infrastructure; the idea of 'freedom' and free culture; and my methods exploring the concepts and producing knowledge.
Access and Power: Film Distribution, Re-intermediation and Piracy
Routledge Companion to the Mapping World Cinema, 2017
Crisp, Virginia (2017) ‘Access and Power: Film Distribution, Re-intermediation and Piracy’ in Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and Alexander Marlow-Mann, eds. Routledge Companion to the Mapping World Cinema Series, London: Routledge, pp. 445 – 454.
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2021
Film piracy is a terrain where traditional concerns of film studies with the formal properties of cinema overlap with legal concerns about the status of film as property. If the former focuses on the aesthetic, diegetic and affective qualities of film as a medium, the latter is concerned with the illicit technological reproduction of the medium. From laws prohibiting camera recordings, region control of DVDs and the use of sniffer dogs to track pirated discs, piracy attests to the dynamic and opposing relations between two major trends that define cinema in our time: the technological and the legal. The property rights of cinema have been traditionally secured through legal controls of the material object of cinema (prints, cassettes, etc.), but there is an inherent tension in cinema's striving for a juridical form, with transformations in the materiality of the medium unsettling possibility of any stable property regime. Thus even as more complicated systems of rights management and licensing in copyright law are created to ensure the smooth flow of films across the world, the ordered flow of cinema is constantly frustrated by technologies that enable the reproduction of a 20 million dollar film on a 20 rupee CD. This split was also reflected in a traditional division of labour between scholarship in film, law and the political economy of media. Piracy has blurred these lines and in the South Asian context there has been a particularly rich tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of film, technology and legal studies. Research on film piracy has been less interested in the legal concerns over what piracy is and more interested in the cultural and technological questions about what piracy does (Bagchi, 2006; Liang, 2008; Sundaram, 2011). Scholarship on piracy in South Asia has focused on questions of modernity and infrastructure and the intertwined worlds of livelihood, survival and leisure. Piracy, in these accounts, becomes a mode through which excluded social worlds make their way into the cultural sphere through innovative techno-practices and lay claim to cultural participation not through a logic of developmental paternalist access granted by the state but as a form of defiant access. While official rhetoric pits film piracy against the film industry as though it were an ahistorical evil that comes from outside, scholarly works on film piracy have demonstrated that piracy has always been an inevitable part of the development of the film industry. Jane Gaines demonstrates that copying was central to the practice of the early industry and the history of early competition was marked by a frantic race by the
A Reader on International Media Piracy
2015
The concept of 'property' is inherently tangled in contradictions and disorders, especially within Information Capitalism where ideas and culture have to be restricted to make a profit, and shared in order to innovate. Marking out property as 'private' and 'profitable' means that it has to be separated from the social complex of its origin, so that this origin is both obscured and marked by the prospect of violence and theft. As David Hume and Pierre Joseph Proudhon suggest property is driven by imagination, metaphor, power, its contribution to symbolic identity, and throughout, by conflict over originality and copying. In Information Capitalism, the tools of 'knowledge' workers are the tools by which their creativity is appropriated, captured and displayed, and their access to property is acquired or retained for the uncertain future. In this situation the boundaries between property and piracy become even more ambiguous. This situation is explored through considering the social formations and activities around peer to peer file-sharing, and the court case involving The Pirate Bay, in which the roles of metaphor and the tension between property, survival and theft are clearly displayed.
Piracy Cultures Editorial Introduction
What are "Piracy Cultures"? Usually, we look at media consumption starting from a media industry definition. We look at TV, radio, newspapers, games, Internet, and media content in general, all departing from the idea that the access to such content is made available through the payment of a license fee or subscription, or simply because it's either paid or available for free (being supported by advertisements or under a "freemium" business model). That is, we look at content and the way people interact with it within a given system of thought that sees content and its distribution channels as the product of relationships between media companies, organizations, and individuals-effectively, a commercial relationship of a contractual kind, with accordant rights and obligations. But what if, for a moment, we turned our attention to the empirical evidence of media consumption practice, not just in Asia, Africa, and South America, but also all over Europe and North America? All over the world, we are witnessing a growing number of people building media relationships outside those institutionalized sets of rules. We do not intend to discuss whether we are dealing with legal or illegal practices; our launching point for this analysis is that, when a very significant proportion of the population is building its mediation through alternative channels of obtaining content, such behavior should be studied in order to deepen our knowledge of media cultures. Because we need a title to characterize those cultures in all their diversity-but at the same time, in their commonplaceness-we propose to call it "Piracy Cultures." 1 The Editors would like to acknowledge the work of Miguel Afonso Caetano and Arlene Luck in making this special section possible. Manuel
Media Piracy and the Terrorist Boogeyman: Speculative Potentiations
The criminalization of media piracy, which dates as far back as the seventeenth-century yoking of copyright infringements to more violent forms of looting on the open seas, runs up against the romantic allure of the swash-buckling pirate. Whether the rogue booksellers of the eighteenth century or contemporary digital file sharers, the media pirate cuts a hip, antiestablishment figure: at once creative, transgressive, and enterprising. So the search for more demoniacal associations continues, roping in the smuggler, the counterfeiter, the serial killer, and, closer to our times, the terrorist. As the war on terror bleeds into the war on piracy, the dual logics of segregation and immunization that shape all biopolitical paradigms of security increasingly inform reports brought out by government agencies and ostensibly independent think tanks. Securitizing the global population against piratical depredation requires the partitioning of piracy into creative activities (collage, sampling, mash up) that produce something new and acts of mere poaching that add no value. This demarcation is mapped onto the planet: large parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—the historically constituted Global South—are marked as problem zones for the global governance of intellectual property. Within these regions, there is a widening chasm between neoliberal elites and the relationally subaltern masses in their adherence to IPR (intellectual property rights) regimes and their attitude toward piratical activities. Starting with the liberal distinction between productive and unproductive forms of media piracy, a distinction that shores up a geopolitics of legality with Asia as its wild and recalcitrant outpost, this article explores the implications of the gap that opens up between legality and legitimacy. In the absence of hard evidence from the informal “survival” sectors, the article draws on ethnographic and anecdotal evidence to explain the lack of political will in enforcing IPR laws. Taking into account the myriad ground-level practices around media forms and platforms, the concept of global media is reconsidered. Finally, the article ends with two takes on the framing of piratical activities as “parasitical.” First, it argues that the “third” of Third Cinema now lives on in these “Southern” piratical practices. Second, in a more speculative vein, it argues for a development of the parasitical as a framework for apprehending the creative potentiations of media piracy beyond the confines of bourgeois legality.
Piracy Cultures| “Free Culture” Lost in Translation
International Journal of Communication, 2012
Analyzing groups such as the Brazilian fans of the television series "Lost" and their independent streaming and subtitling activities, this article discusses the relationships among virtual communities of fans and the implications for distribution, access, and exchange of content produced by cultural industries. It defends the view that the flexibility of a worldwide network of fans, fragmented and disseminated on a global scale, allows their actions to operate not only as catalysts of the discussion around access and distribution of cultural products, but to challenge power levels, compressing hierarchies through as-yet-unimaginable forms of participation. It argues that the activities examined are part of a new design of interdependence of media such as TV and the Internet and that the role of groups such as the "Lost" fans studied are fundamental to the discussion of the flow of media products in a globalized society. El sentido común, el sentido comunitario, es un bichito duro de matar. (Common sense, sense of community, is a tough bug to kill.) ~Eduardo Galeano Em princípio o consumo não é mal, o mal é não poder consumir.