Piracy (original) (raw)

2021, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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