Media Piracy In The Cultural Economy

This book takes a Marxist approach to the study of media piracy – the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts in violation of intellectual property laws – to examine its place as an endemic feature of the cultural economy since the rise of the Internet. The author explores media piracy not in terms of its moral or legal failings, or as the inevitable by-product of digital technologies, but as a symptom of a much larger restructuring of cultural labor in the era of the Internet: labor that is digital, entrepreneurial, informal, and even illegal, and increasingly politicized. Sketching the contours of this new political economy while engaging with theories of digital media, both critical and celebratory, Mueller reveals piracy as a submerged social history of the digital world, and potentially the key to its political reimagining. This significant contribution to the study of piracy and digital culture will be vital reading for scholars and students of critical media studies, cultural studies, political theory, or digital humanities, and particularly those researching media piracy, digital labor, the digital economy, and Marxist theory.

Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity. Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia. Based on three years of work by some thirty five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

How are “grey market” imports changing media industries? What is the role of piracy in developing new markets for movies and TV shows? How do jailbroken iPhones drive innovation? The Informal Media Economy provides a vivid, original, and genuinely transnational account of contemporary media, by showing how the interactions between formal and informal media systems are a feature of all nations – rich and poor, large and small. Shifting the focus away from the formal businesses and public enterprises that have long occupied media researchers, this book charts a parallel world of cultural intermediaries driving global media production and circulation. It shows how unlicensed, untaxed, or unregulated networks, which operate across the boundaries of established media markets, have been a driving force of media industry transformation. The book opens up new insights on a range of topical issues in media studies, from the creative disruptions of digitisation to amateur production, piracy and cybercrime.

This book explores the complex interplay of culture and economics in the context of Philippine cinema. It delves into the tension, interaction, and shifting movements between mainstream and independent filmmaking, examines the film distribution and exhibition systems, and investigates how existing business practices affect the sustainability of the independent sector. This book addresses the lack or absence of Asian representation in film distribution literature by supplying the much-needed Asian context and case study. It also advances the discourse of film distribution economy by expounding on the formal and semi-formal film distribution practices in a developing Asian country like the Philippines, where the thriving piracy culture is considered as ‘normal,’ and which is commonly depicted and discussed in existing literature. As such, this will be the first book that looks into the specifics of the Philippine film distribution and exhibition system and provides a historical grounding of its practices.

The past two decades have witnessed major changes in film industries worldwide in response to both economic globalisation and technological developments. The dominant position of Hollywood movies in the global film market has remained largely uncontested, but Hollywood itself has become increasingly international in its operations whilst ‘regional’ screen industries such as those in East Asia and in the Indian subcontinent have (re-)emerged and developed new forms of collaboration. The advent of digital technologies has also transformed the content of films and the ways in which they are made and consumed. Such changes, in turn, have posed new economic and cultural challenges for policy-makers around the world and led to a degree of rethinking of how film policy objectives are to be conceived, defined and implemented. This collection brings together a range of international scholars from the USA, Europe and Asia to consider how film policy has responded to the various economic, technological and political shifts shaping the global film industry; and to identify the many tensions between global and local, economic and cultural, and public and private policy objectives that have been the result of these changes. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.

Global Cultural Economy critically interrogates the role cultural and creative industries play in societies. By locating these industries in their broader cultural and economic contexts, Christiaan De Beukelaer and Kim-Marie Spence combine their repertoires of empirical work across four continents to define the ‘cultural economy’ as the system of production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods and services, as well as the cultural, economic, social, and political contexts in which it operates. Each chapter introduces and discusses a different theme, such as inclusion, diversity, sustainability, and ownership, highlighting the tensions around them to elicit an active engagement with possible and provisional solutions. The themes are explored through case studies including Bollywood, Ghanaian music, the Korean Wave, Jamaican Reggae, and the UN Creative Economy Reports. Written with students, researchers, and policy-makers in mind, Global Cultural Economy is ideal for anyone interested in the creative and cultural industries, media and cultural studies, cultural policy, and development studies.

The Piracy Years: Internet File Sharing in a Global Context is the first collection to provide an overview of digital piracy’s recent past and its potential futures. Combining research essays, interviews, and overviews, the volume brings together leading scholars and infamous digital pirates from China, Germany, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In June 1999, the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing website Napster transformed the availability of online content, but the site was quickly sued into oblivion. Despite the highly publicised shutdowns of a number of P2P websites, many continue to thrive, and digital piracy has become a global phenomenon. This book argues that any future media theory and research will have to contend with such web practices remaining an integral and politically formative part of the Internet. Offline and online piracies thrive on technological affordances in opposition to corporate efforts – in music, film, publishing, and academia – to label them as threatening to the economy and society. Therefore, this book explores piracy as a phenomenon navigating the conventions, norms, and boundaries of legality in digital cultures. Pirate networked sociabilities work within and outside the fringes of market economy through the lens of institutional and discursive power. By creating new ways that keep society moving and from stagnation, they ensure its continued existence - including the survival of the very areas they attack. The Piracy Years is an essential resource for researchers, post-graduate students, and anyone interested in the global spread and ever-increasing importance of digital piracy.