Manuel Castells - Piracy Cultures: How a Growing Portion of the Global Population is Building Media Relationships Through Alternate Channels of Obtaining Content

How a Growing Portion of the Global Population is

Building Media Relationships Through Alternate

Channels of Obtaining Content

MANUEL CASTELLS & GUSTAVO CARDOSO, EDS.

The articles from this collection previously appeared as a Special Section of the International Journal of Communication (http://ijoc.org), a publication of the USC Annenberg Press. University of Southern California. The Special Section can be accessed at http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1610/732

ISBN Ebook: 978-1-4797-3227-2

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Table of Contents

Piracy Cultures
Editorial Introduction

University of Southern California

Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL)

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 its 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 individualseffectively, 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 diversitybut at the same time, in their commonplacenesswe propose to call it Piracy Cultures .

By addressing the dimension of piracy cultures , we hope to increase our understanding of the practices and cultural drives (both individual and collectivenational cultures , generational cultures , etc.) of fruition and consumption of media (cinema, TV series, music, books, games, etc.) under what is labeled, by both legal and managerial cultures , as piracy .

Our aim is to give new insights into how those current practices might either evolve toward new institutionalized market practices and a changed perception of the law, or remain as counter-cultural movements, although ones shared by large portions of the population.

The importance of addressing piracy studies in our societies is also stressed by several analyses. Given that without piracy, there is no legitimate circulation (Dent, 2012), the pirate can thus be presented as the enemy of all (Heller-Roazen, 2009), an individual who has committed the definitive transgression of the information age (Johns, 2009, p. 5).

But should we consider these views as encompassing the overall reality portrayed by the concept of Piracy Cultures? Probably not, because we still know little about such social actors, their practices and representations, and their overall contributions to the networked cultures of belonging that map our everyday life.

The different views on piracy cultures that constitute this special section also remind us of the rising importance of information and knowledge as commodities, marking the emergence of a new economic paradigm where manufacturing and energy are no longer the key sources of profit.

Consequently, informational piracy, or piracy of digital goods and services, becomes another key feature to address within the informational capitalism framework analysis. Indeed, for many, [T]he pirate deserves the worst punishments because he or she has apparently foresworn fundamental social normsproperty, ownership, and exclusivity (Dent, 2012).

The only problem with this simplified picture painted by many governments, news media, multimedia conglomerates and law firms is that the pirates are more often than not all of usincluding them, as several stories of copyright infringement involving these very same actors can testifyand not a comfortingly distinct outsider (Johns, 2009, p. 4).

Piracy cultures have become part of our everyday life in the network society, sometimes even without us, fully acknowledging them as such.

Although Adrian Johns aptly demonstrates that piracy is not peculiar to the digital revolution it has its own historical continuities and discontinuities, and its own historical consequences (ibid., p. 6), it was only with the rise of networked communication that the issue of intellectual piracy became a more acknowledged theme of academic interest (Benkler, 2006; Boyle, 2008; Gillespie, 2007; Lessig, 2001, 2004, 2008; Netanel, 2008; Patry, 2009, 2012; Vaidhyanathan, 2001, 2005; Zittrain, 2008). However, most of the literature has, until now, carried the mark of its origin in the law schools of the most prominent universities of the Western world. Not unrelated to this was the fact that the first struggles over copyright involved peer-to-peer file-sharing programs conceived by American developers, programs like Napster and Grokster whose legal status as technological tools was initially challenged.

Beyond law studies, another significant branch of research on piracy has also surfaced, one focusing on the measurement of the economic impact of file-sharing on various markets and industries (Grassmuck, 2010; Liebowitz, 2006, 2008; Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf, 2007, 2009; Rob & Walfogel, 2004, 2007; Zentner,
2005, 2006).

While this hegemony of legal and economic perspectives into piracy studies had been put in dispute by a few authors who, writing from the point of view of developing countries, tried to situate unauthorized uses of copyrighted works in a wider sociocultural context (Larkin, 2004; Liang, 2005, 2009; Sundaram, 2009; Wang, 2003), it was not until very recently that the first studies of global consumption of media emerged. One such example, conducted by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), is the study on Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, which comprises the results gathered over a period of four years by research teams in Bolivia, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, and Brazil. This report is of interest for us not only because it is based on the intellectual property policy views of developing countries (as opposed to the traditional predominance of developed countries perspectives), but also because it breaks away from disciplinary divisions by looking at piracy practices from a combined legal, economic, social, and cultural angle.