Piracy: Leakages from Modernity

Description

"Piracy" is a concept that seems everywhere in the contemporary world. From the big screen with the dashing Jack Sparrow, to the dangers off the coast of Somalia; from the claims by the Motion Picture Association of America that piracy funds terrorism, to the political impact of pirate parties in countries like Sweden and Germany. While the spread of piracy provokes responses from the shipping and copyright industries, the reverse is also true: for every new development in capitalist technologies, some sort of "piracy" moment emerges. This may be most obvious in the current ideologisation of Internet piracy, where the rapid spread of so called pirate parties is developing into a kind of global political movement. While the pirates of Somalia seem a long way removed from Internet pirates illegally downloading the latest music hit, it is the assertion of this book that such developments indicate a complex interplay between capital flows and relations, late modernity, property rights and spaces of contestation. That is, piracy emerges at specific nodes in capitalist relations that create both blockages and leaks between different social actors. These various aspects of piracy form the focus for this book. It is a collection of texts that takes a broad perspective on piracy and attempts to capture the multidimensional impacts of piracy on capitalist society today. The book is edited by James Arvanitakis at the University of Western Sydney and Martin Fredriksson at Linköping University, Sweden. Table of Contents On Piracy List of Acronyms Part I — Ontology The Pirate Imaginary and the Potential of the Authorial Pirate To Name a Thief: Constructing the Deviant Pirate “You Can’t Change our Ancestors Without our Permission”: Cultural Perspectives on Biopiracy Piratical Community and the Digital Age: The Structural Racialization of Piracy in European Law and Culture1 Part II — Politics Modernity, Law and the Violence of Piracy, Property and the State ‘Pirates’ in EU’s (Semi)Peripheries The IPR GPR: The Emergence of a Global Prohibition Regime to Regulate Intellectual Property Infringement BitTorrent: Stealing or Sharing Culture? A Discussion of the Pirate Bay Case and the Documentaries “Steal This Film I & II” The Internet Between Politics and the Political: Cultural Resistance or Corporate Assistance: Part III — Practice The Justifications of Piracy: Set the Fox to Watch the Geese: Pirate Economies and the Production of Smooth Spaces The Collaborative Production of Amateur Subtitles for Pirated TV Shows in Brazil After Piracy: Reflections of Industrial Designers in Taiwan on Sustainable Innovations Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring: An Epilogue Privacy is Theft: On Anonymous Experiences, Infrastructural Politics and Accidental Encounters Contributing Authors INDEX