Piracy Of Intellectual Property

Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood. Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

Fraud and piracy of products and ideas have become common in the early twenty-first century, as opportunities to commit them expand, and technology makes fraud and piracy easy to carry out. In Combating Piracy: Intellectual Property Theft and Fraud, Jay S. Albanese and his contributors provide new analyses of intellectual property theft and how perpetrators innovate and adapt in response to shifting opportunities. The cases described here illustrate the wide-ranging nature of the activity and the spectrum of persons involved in piracy of intellectual property. Intellectual property theft includes stolen copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents, which represent the creative work of individuals for which others cannot claim credit. The distributors of books, movies, music, and other forms of intellectual property pay for this right, and those who distribute this work without compensation to its creator effectively hijack or -pirate- that property without the owner's or distributor's permission. The problem has grown to the point where most software in many parts of the world is pirated. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 percent of all pharmaceuticals available worldwide are counterfeit. Such widespread fraud illustrates the global reach of the problem and the need for international remedies that include changed attitudes, public education, increasing the likelihood of apprehension, and reducing available opportunities. The contributors show that piracy is a form of fraud, a form of organized crime, a white-collar crime, a criminal activity with causes we can isolate and prevent, and a global problem. This book examines each of these perspectives to determine how they contribute to our understanding of the issues involved.

Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America is the first sustained effort to present an alternative framework for understanding piracy and contemporary challenges to global discourses on intellectual property (IP) in the Americas. While piracy might just look like theft and derivative reproduction from the perspective of many right-holders, the contributors to this volume go beyond this economic-driven logic and show how practices of copying are in fact practices of reinvention that reflect the rich social networks and forms of creativity, authorship, commerce, and consumption that characterize informal economies. From a perspective informed by contemporary scenarios in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, and the United States, they engage in a discussion of alternatives that—predicated on the importance of protecting culture—allow for other ways of conceiving prosperity at local, national, regional, and global levels. Examples discussed include video games, clothing, trinkets, music, film, TV, and books. Designed to help understand the broader implications of IP and piracy for the field of Latin American studies, this book will be a major contribution to Global South studies, as well as to the growing bibliography on globalization, informal markets, and piracy.

China is by far the world's leading producer of pirated goods—from films and books to clothing, from consumer electronics to aircraft parts. As China becomes a full participant in the international economy, its inability to enforce intellectual property rights is coming under escalating international scrutiny. What is the impact, Andrew C. Mertha asks, of external pressure on China's enforcement of intellectual property? The conventional wisdom sees a simple correlation between greater pressure and better domestic compliance with international norms and declared national policy. Mertha's research tells a different story: external pressure may lead to formal agreements in Beijing, resulting in new laws and official regulations, but it is China's complex network of bureaucracies that decides actual policy and enforcement. The structure of the administrative apparatus that is supposed to protect intellectual property rights makes it possible to track variation in the effects of external pressure for different kinds of intellectual property.Mertha shows that while the sustained pressure of state-to-state negotiations has shaped China's patent and copyright laws, it has had little direct impact on the enforcement of those laws. By contrast, sustained pressure from inside China, on the part of foreign trademark-owners and private investigation companies in their employ, provides a far greater rate of trademark enforcement and spurs action from anti-counterfeiting agencies.

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.

In this original study of intellectual property rights (IPR) in relation to state capacity, Dimitrov analyzes this puzzle by offering the first systematic analysis of all IPR enforcement avenues in China, across all IPR subtypes. He shows that the extremely high volume of enforcement provided for copyrights and trademarks is unfortunately of a low quality, and as such serves only to perpetuate IPR violations. In the area of patents, however, he finds a low volume of high-quality enforcement. In light of these findings, the book develops a theory of state capacity that conceptualizes the Chinese state as simultaneously weak and strong. The book draws on extensive fieldwork in China and five other countries, as well as on 10 unique IPR enforcement datasets that exploit previously unexplored sources, including case files of private investigation firms.

Fraud and piracy of products and ideas have become common in the early twenty-first century, as opportunities to commit them expand, and technology makes fraud and piracy easy to carry out. In Combating Piracy: Intellectual Property Theft and Fraud, Jay S. Albanese and his contributors provide new analyses of intellectual property theft and how perpetrators innovate and adapt in response to shifting opportunities.The cases described here illustrate the wide-ranging nature of the activity and the spectrum of persons involved in piracy of intellectual property. Intellectual property theft includes stolen copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents, which represent the creative work of individuals for which others cannot claim credit. The distributors of books, movies, music, and other forms of intellectual property pay for this right, and those who distribute this work without compensation to its creator effectively hijack or "pirate" that property without the owner's or distributor's permission. The problem has grown to the point where most software in many parts of the world is pirated. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 percent of all pharmaceuticals available worldwide are counterfeit.Such widespread fraud illustrates the global reach of the problem and the need for international remedies that include changed attitudes, public education, increasing the likelihood of apprehension, and reducing available opportunities. The contributors show that piracy is a form of fraud, a form of organized crime, a white-collar crime, a criminal activity with causes we can isolate and prevent, and a global problem. This book examines each of these perspectives to determine how they contribute to our understanding of the issues involved.

An understanding of the changing nature of the law and practice of copyright infringement is a task too big for lawyers alone; it requires additional inputs from economists, historians, technologists, sociologists, cultural theorists and criminologists. Where is the boundary to be drawn between illegal imitation and legal inspiration? Would the answer be different for creators, artists and experts from different disciplines or fields? How have concepts of copyright infringement altered over time and how do such changes relate, if at all, to the cultural norms operating amongst creators in different fields? With such an approach, one might perhaps begin to address the vital and overarching question of whether strong copyright laws, rigorously enforced, impede rather than promote creativity. And what can be done to avoid any such adverse consequences, while maintaining the effectiveness of copyright as an incentive-mechanism for those who need it?