Tilman BaumgÃrtel on Wed, 25 Nov 2015 12:10:07 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> the triumph of the pirates |
Dear all, this is my conclusion of the reader "The Pirate Essays: A Reader on International Media Piracy", that was just published by Amsterdam University Press. Yours, Tilman The Triumph of the Pirates Books, Letters, Movies, and Vegan Candy â Not a Conclusion Tilman BaumgÃrtel After recently returning to Germany, the country of my birth after teaching media studies for seven years in Asia â first in the Philippines, then in Cambodia â I was slapped with two Abmahnungen in a month. An Abmahnung is a written warning in the German judicial system, similar to the âcease and desistâ letter used in the Anglo-Saxon world: a formal request by one person, usually a lawyer, to another person to immediately stop a certain behavior. In my case, the undesirable behavior was the downloading and sharing of two movies: Carnage (2011) by Roman Polanski and Merantau(2009), a martial arts movie by Welsh director Gareth Evans set in Indonesia. That this could happen to me â a media critic who has done research on piracy for a decade â is a major embarrassment. Of course, I was aware of the fact that film studios and distributors â in Germany as well as elsewhere â had started to hire law firms and specialized companies to track down Internet users who shared files thought to be the intellectual property of these companies. As part of my research I had read about these goings on in the West, even though I was in Cambodia, where none of this mattered to anyone: copyrighted DVDs were (and still are) widely available on the markets, new films could be bought shortly after (or even before) they were released in their respective home markets, and monitoring the downloading of music and movies by net surfers had not occurred to anyone. There were two reasons, why I was caught: First, I always assumed that the films I typically downloaded and shared were so arcane that nobody would ever bother to look for offenders. Turned out that I had one (and only one) film on my hard disk that was âintellectual propertyâ of, among others, a major Hollywood studio: Roman Polanskiâs Carnage (2011), coproduced by Wild Bunch from the US and Constantin from Germany, plus a number of other companies that shared the costs of making a film by a director who himself at this time was the subject of criminal prosecution because of his alleged affair with a minor. Merantau(2009) â most likely the first film shot in Indonesia that rose to international prominence since 1980s B-movie fare such as Mystics in Bali (1981) or Lady Terminator (1989) â had been purchased after successful screenings on international festivals by German company Koch Media from Munich, wanted to prevent the film from being available in Germany before the local release date in July 2012. The other reason was that I had simply forgotten that a little program on my computer called ÂTorrent still pumped bits and bytes of films I had downloaded on my computer back onto the Internet for the benefit of the international file-sharing public every time I turned the machine on. Well, I had been living in an environment where there were no lobby group, no âintellectual rights protection organization,â no specialized police department, and no lawyers who had turned coming down hard on file sharers into a business model. I quickly found out that combating the new German Abmahnungsindustrie (the law firms that served file sharers with threatening Abmahnungen) had brought a kind of anti-industry into existence. Just searching for the words âfilmâ and âAbmahnungâ on Google produced endless lists of law firms that were more than ready to help me in my fight against my prosecutors and that undercut themselves for the fee for their services. I felt like I had become a pawn in a version of the popular Spy vs. Spy cartoons in which some lawyers threatened to sue me while other lawyers reminded them that their demands were not actually legitimate according to German law. To decide whether I had actually broken German law would have been the subject of a time-consuming and potentially very expensive confrontation before the German courts. I did not want to go down that route. So to make a long story short: I paid â150 each to the two law firms that helped me in this matter, and, after some short haggling over the phone between my lawyers and those of the movie companies, the penalties for my file-sharing activities went down to â700 for the Polanski movie (originally â2,500) and â500 for the Indonesian action flick (originally â5,000) â savor, if you will, the irony of the different sums for âpiratingâ a Western and an Asian film. The legality of all this is questionable â but thatâs the way I (and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other accused of the same wrongdoing) chose to settle the business with the companies who felt that I had violated their intellectual property. Case closed â before it even began. What is of importance for the purposes of this book are two things: First there was my sense of entitlement. I felt that as a temporary inhabitant of the Third World, I had the moral right to obtain whatever films, music, e-books, etc., I wanted from the net without charge. The countries of the Global South had been denied the possibility of availing themselves of most art house films or movie classics for decades, the reasoning goes among many intellectuals in these countries, so it was their right to get these films in the shadow economy of online sharing. I leave it up to the reader to decide how morally correct my stance was or is â after all, I was only a long-term guest first in the Philippines, then in Cambodia, where I had started to get interested in researching media piracy, which eventually resulted in the book you are currently reading. However, the other thing of importance in this context is well beyond moral reasoning, but about the mere function of a technology â unchecked, in this case, because of my forgetfulness. I want to argue in this conclusionthat piracy is a worthwhile subject for academic study, not just because of the economic, social, and political significance of this subject and the consequences that it has had for the way media are distributed and consumed. Working on piracy has also forced me to put schools of media theory in dialogue that typically do not have much to say to each other, but that I have found to be quite fruitful (as well as insightful) for the study of the subject of piracy: The âmedia materialistâ approach of Friedrich Kittler I had grown up with and the insistence of scholars like John Fiske and Henry Jenkins that the audience had its own agency in the circulation of media âtexts,â the âRevaluation of All Valuesâ of intellectual property and copyright that was undertaken both by the international hacker community and by thinkers such as Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, with the empiric studies that are still the bread and butter of Anglo-Saxon media studies. I myself have grown up in the intellectual milieu of the poststructuralist German media studies that â inspired and shaped by the works of Friedrich Kittler â have put the autonomy of technology at the center of its discourse. Inspired by, among others, McLuhan (and his focus on âmedialityâ), Kittler developed a brand of media theory that has been labeled as âmedia materialism,â a term he undoubtedly would have disagreed with. In this approach, he provoked the German film and media studies that developed in the 1960s and 1970s â and who often took their cue from the sociology of the Frankfurt School â by focusing exclusively on material networks and technologies used for the production, processing, transmission, and storage of information. Content became data, culture the effect of the workings of media technologies such as the typewriter, the record player, or, finally, the computer. âThere Is No Software,â the title of one of his best-known essays, summarizes this approach (Kittler 1995), when he declares the Intel 4004 microprocessor to be the beginning of âour postmodern writing sceneâ or when â as in his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter â he keeps reminding us of Nietzscheâs insight that âour writing tools are also working on our thoughts,â out of which he develops a whole genealogy of German literature at the turn of the century (Kittler 1999, 200-214). âMedia determine our situation,â as he wrote in the introduction to this book, âwhich deserves â in spite or because of it â a descriptionâ (Kittler 1999, xxxix). Kittlerâs works have been described as âtechno-deterministic,â which is an oversimplification, just as my reading of his works is here. Yet, he has clearly privileged the technological over the social in his media discourse analysis, and the tensions between users, communications technologies, and the socio-political systems that govern such technologies were of little interest to him. This approach seemed to provide a rich framework to analyze piracy with. After all, could there be a more radical proof of the all-encompassing power of a new technology, then the way digital recording media and the Internet wrecked and reconfigured the way we consume music and movies in the course of a decade? On the one hand, there was this new technology, that ruthlessly â and with a cockiness that brought to mind Kittlerâs own personal style â imposed its rules on audio-visual culture: Whole cultural forms such as literature, music, film turned into digital data that could be copied and reproduced indefinitely without loss of quality. That could be sent around the globe via the Internet and be listened to or watched as a file downloaded onto a computer or received as a data stream. And that this data could be burned onto optical discs and sold for a dollar on the street corner in a city in any given Third World country. The grief and the economic upheaval that this caused to the media industry â an industry that was transformed beyond recognition in just a few years â seemed utmost proof of Kittlerâs claim that technology had become the new subject of history and that this technology neither possessed morals, nor experienced sociability. But on the other hand, I could not help noticing that all this happened not just because of the inevitable power of technology that enabled the process, but also that human agency played a crucial role in what was happening. While technology made possible the piracy that I observed â both on the Internet and in the streets of Manila, Shanghai, Beijing, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Min City, and Phnom Penh (and could have observed in Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Bucharest, or Hanoi, as some of the essays in this book make clear) â it wasnât technology, that put these films and these records on the Internet or printed them on DVDs, even though technology enabled that process in a way inconceivable only a decade earlier. Hence I had to look for theoretical models that would help me to understand the role of the facilitators of this process. I was about to talk about the audience of pirated media here, but the whole concept of the audience as a mass of consumers had been irretrievably pulverized by the very same digital media that facilitated the piracy I had become interested in. Every consumer of media content could potentially become a producer of digital media content, too â or at least upload the media content others had produced, on the net. The creativity of these new, technologically empowered âprosumersâ could range from creating their own works from scratch torecombining songs and movies as digital collages/remixes/mash-ups to just ripping DVDs and putting them on the Internet. If you f.ind it frivolous to put both the creator of original works and the pirate who uploads movies on the net in the same category, keep in mind not only the fact that digitally enhanced creativity is reproductive by trend, but also that even Lawrence Lessig himself proudly described his organization of play lists of his MP3s as a creative act.1 So how about the Chinese DVD pirate who chose movies for the ever-popular compilation disks (all the f.ilms of Bruce Lee or half a dozen movies with snakes, all on one DVD), designed the cover out of images he downloaded from the Internet, created Chinese-language subtitles, and found ways to have these f. ilm collections printed and distributed for a profit? Of course, Lessig himself draws the line between unacceptable theft of intellectual property and creative use of digital raw material at what is referred to âtransformative authorshipâ(2004, 203) â the use of other authorâs material that makes substantial changes to the original source. In one of the more problematic parts of his book Free Culture he constructs a brand of âAsian piracyâ that precisely lacks this kind of authorship, as it adds no value and contributes nothing to the material it appropriates: "All across the world, but especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are businesses that do nothing but take others peopleâs copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it â all without the permission of a copyright owner. The recording industry estimates that it loses about $4.6 billion every year to physical piracy (that works out to one in three CDs sold worldwide). The MPAA estimates that it loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy. This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this book, nor in the argument that most people make when talking about the subject of this book, should draw into doubt this simple point: This piracy is wrong." (Lessig 2004, 63) Apart from the fact that Lessig used the completely discredited numbers that the MPAA published as a fact, there is another reality that needs tobe acknowledged here: in other parts of his book, Lessig went to considerable lengths to defend the users of f. ile-sharing services such as Napster, a practice that at that time was â due to technical constraints and slow Internet connections outside of the âGlobal Northâ â more or less limited to the Western world. If North Americans use peer-to-peer services, it isacceptable, but if the people in countries âespecially in Asia and Eastern Europeâ sell or purchase DVDs with pirated content, it is wrong? Thesecomments by a well-respected liberal scholar are but one reminder of how the discourse about the results of digital technology could wander intohighly unpleasant territory once the ostensible neutrality of technologyis left behind. In any case, technology has social implications that I had to acknowledgeif I wanted to understand the phenomenon of piracy better than the German media materialism matrix allowed me to â a fact that the judicial consequences of the unsupervised functioning of my little torrent program demonstrated to me with severe financial consequences. The Internet had brought into being a culture of fans and aficionados ready to share whatever cultural creation they have on their hard disk that would have a tremendous impact on the direction that the creation of art, music, and films would take. By cracking down on those who availed themselves of this possibility, the media industry also alienated some of their most loyal customers and criminalized those that experimented with new approaches to the distribution of media that the Internet seemed to suggest (Sinnreich 2013). At the same time, musical newcomers from the Arctic Monkeys to Justin Bieber to OK Go to Psy to Foster the People were discovered because they took advantage of the mechanisms of free distribution that the Internet allowed. (These artists, of course, published their own songs on the net rather than just republishing material from other artists.) The much-praised new American television series from The Sopranos to Lost, from Game of Thrones to Mad Men might have never gotten so popular if it had not been for their most dedicated and Internet-savvy fans. The global success of these shows depended to no small degree on the websites, blogs entries, and postings on Facebook and Twitter where they were praised and dissected. Some of these fans enthusiastically put every new episode of these shows on the net for download minutes after they had been screened on US cable channels, often subtitling them in their own languages in the process (Bold 2011;Vandresen 2012). (Isnât that an example of the âtransformative authorshipâ that Lawrence Lessig argued was the hallmark of original work?) George R. R. Martin, the novelist on whose books and scripts Game ofThrones is based, director David Petrarca, and HBO programming president Michael Lombardo infuriate the American media industry by pointing out that piracy had not only not hurt the show financially, but the fact that the show was âthe most pirated show in the worldâ was actually âa complimentâ or even âbetter than a Grammyâ (Dewey 2013). The pirated versions of the show, so their argument went, eventually led to HBO subscription going up, and added to the prestige of the cable company even among those who did not subscribe to the channel. Author Martin was particular verbal in pointing out that the old practice of releasing television shows in different markets according to marketing considerations was deemed obsolete by the new kind of Internet piracy that allowed right-here-right-now-access to them: If you wanted to stay ahead of the piracy game, you simply had to make your show available at every market at the same time.2 These developments made particular sense in the theoretical framework that media scholars like Henry Jenkins had developed. Influenced by the approach of the British cultural studies and particular by the writings of John Fiske, he focused on the active participation of the audience in the construction of meaning of culture â or even its (re)creation by that audience. When studying popular culture and Internet-enabled phenomena like fan fiction, he had come to the conclusion that the fans had played an important role in developing and canonizing shows such as Star Trek or The Simpsons. To Jenkins, the fans who turned media âtextsâ into playgrounds of their own imagination were âtextual poachers,â who heralded a new kind of participatory culture. The creative (and âethicalâ) appropriation of such media content is, according to Jenkins, one of the core media literacies of the 21st century (Jenkins 2012). He put this idea in relation to the concept ofâCultural Jamming,â that Mark Dery developed in his influential 1993 essay âCulture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signsâ (Dery 2014). I was sure to include this essay â which I had read when it first came out in 1993, but which now took on an entirely new meaning â as well as chapters from Jenkinsâs book Textual Poachers in the readings of the classes on piracy that I taught subsequently. The materiality of information technology and their social foundation in very different cultures, however, had taken on an entirely new urgency in my research, and the best sources came from publications that looked at the phenomenon of piracy with the tool set of empirical research, often written from the perspective of intellectuals of the BRIC and Third World states. This book contains some essays that take this perspective, namely those on piracy in Vietnam, Brazil, Romania, and Nigeria. The writings on phenomena such as mod chips, digital rights management (DRM), and copy protection add to this rich discourse on piracy by looking at the plain facts on their respective subjects by employing the framework of cultural studies. But there had been other examples of texts that took a more empirical stance toward piracy, some published before I had started my own research, namely William Alfordâs To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offfence (1995), a groundbreaking book on the Chinese approach toward intellectual property. This book still stands out today, because it successfully integrated the discussion of piracy into a much larger cultural context (and in a way, preceded Laikwan Pangâs two studies on the way contemporary China engages with the international copyright regime today, books written in a similar spirit [Pang 2007, 2012]). An important publication that provided ample empirical material on the way how piracy operated differently in different countries was the pioneering âThe CopySouth Dossier: Issues in the Economics, Politics, and Ideology of Copyright in the Global Southâ (Story, Darch, and Halbert 2006) that looked at intellectual property issues from the perspective of the GlobalSouth and took a decidedly political stance toward the issue. The well-funded and globally conducted study Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (Karaganis 2011) and Roman Lobatoâs Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (Lobato 2012) followed in the footsteps of this highly original work. My understanding of global piracy has also been improved by studies that looked at the culture of piracy in various countries(Mertha 2006; Liang 2009; Tolentino 2009; Sundaram 2010; Torres 2012) to which I myself added essays on the piracy in the Philippines (BaumgÃrtel 2006) and the impact of piracy on independent film production in Southeast Asia (BaumgÃrtel 2012). Then there was, of course, Adrian Johnsâs far-reaching study Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009). And no list of publications on piracy would be complete without mentioning some of the more popular studies on the subject (Lasica 2005), that also include relatively level-headed economic studies (Chaudhry and Zimmerman 2009), but also books that use the subject for spectacular accounts of international crime (Phillips 2005; NaÃm 2005), not to mention the by now legendary rant about how piracy supposedly funds terrorism from the RAND corporation (Treverton et al. 2009).3 This should by no means indicate that piracy has become (or even is on his way to become) a well-established subject of media studies or any other academic discipline. While intellectual property has been recognized as a highly relevant subject in the digital age (partly because of the insistence of the media industry) â âthe oil of the 21st centuryâ as Mark Getty, chairman ofGetty Images, is often quoted as saying â piracy as its shady counterpart has received much less attention by scholars. This might be partly so, because piracy remains a moving target, both in terms of the discourse around the subject as well as a practice. Whatever you think piracy is, it stops being, it seems. Since the advent of the Internet, there has been a variety of brief âpiracy periodsâ centered around scores of different technologies that appeared and disappeared in a kind of legal version of the popular Whac-A-Mole game â as soon as one technology and their providers were successfully sued and bullied out of existence a new way to share media online arrived. Just to mention a few examples: The advent of the online distribution of copyrighted material by âwarez groupsâ via early bulletin board systems and the Usenet beginning in the 1980s. Early â and painfully slow â downloadsites on the first iteration of the World Wide Web. The beginning of filesharing as a global phenomenon â almost a new youth subculture â with Napster, the development of more sophisticated and less easy-to-trace network protocols such as Kazaa, Gnutella, eMule, or LimeWire, and, finally, the triumph of BitTorrent technology, including the legal battles that brought some of these services to an early end. The cyberlockers, filehosting services, cloud-storage services, and online file-storage providers, from MP3.com to Megaupload, that for a period made copyrighted content easily available, before the media industry again managed to squash the majority of these services with legal means. The rise of invitation-onlyâdarknets,â where the heavy-duty dealing with copyrighted material tookplace among warez groups that competed with each other to be the first to release much-anticipated films (see Lasica 2005, 47-67). The advent of the anonymous, heavily encrypted Tor network and its subsequent use for illegal purposes of all kinds, including the Silk Road, an anonymous online black market used for illegal transactions. The trend toward streaming sites such as movie4k.to. And â probably most relevant in the context of this book â the development of a whole political movement against the increasingly stifling effects of copyright that started with the founding of the Piratpartiet in Sweden, an example that was soon followed in other countries. While the long-term perspectives of these political organizations are far from clear, it remains a fact that the Pirate parties in countries like Germany and Sweden were for a time able to channel a wide-ranging discontent â especially among young people â about their rights and freedoms in the digital age that resulted, for instance, in large mass protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty and articulated their concerns about numerous other Internet-related issues both on the Internet as well as with protests in public space. Hence, the rise of online piracy was accompanied by a new form of political activism. That does not mean that the sharing of media has become a universally accepted practice, on the contrary. Of course, there have been initiatives such as Lawrence Lessigâs Creative Commons that aims to give back the creators of culture some kind of control over the distribution and monetization of their works. And there is a growing political awareness that material from publicly funded institutions such as libraries or public radio and television stations should be available widely, which means online, and that the fruits of the intellectual labor that the government has supported at universities and other research institutions should be published in âopen accessâ databases. However, as far as commercially distributed movies, music, and software is concerned, the battle between those who want to share this material online for free and those who want to make a profit out of it continues with no end in sight. As I write this, the front page of the notorious torrent tracker The Pirate Bay asks for the support for their founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde, who are currently serving time in jail. Under pictures of the two young men, who at the height of the international controversy around the site served as the outspoken defenders of the right to share copyrighted material over the Internet, it says: âShow your support by sending them some encouraging mail! Gottfrid is only allowed to receive letters while Peter gladly received books, letter [sic] and vegan candy.â The pictures have an iconic quality to them; the two look the way we remember them from Simon Kloseâs film TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay away from Keyboard (2013), the documentary about their battle with the Swedish legal system. Despite international support, they were sentenced to two years in jail and also had to pay a joint f.ine of more than â3 million. According to a report by European MP Julia Reda, Sunde is now held in isolation in a prison populated by perpetrators of violent crimes in Sweden (Reda 2014). Svartholm, who has been accused of other crimes related to hacking, is in solitary confinement in Denmark. However, The Pirate Bay that Svartholm and Sunde helped found in 2003 has seen an tremendous increase in the number of shared files in the last couple of years despite the conviction of the two and despite the efforts of the âcontent industryâ to curb piracy. The Pirate Bay is still among the hundred most popular websites on the Internet, and the visitor numbers have doubled between 2011 and 2014 (Ernesto 2014); however, it is not known-how the number of site visitors translates into downloaded content. At the same time, other statistics indicate that the net traffic generated by file sharing has gone down in relation to the total Internet traffic, while video streaming sites such as YouTube or Netflix â that offer video content that you can watch in real time rather than waiting for them to download â are now responsible for more than 60% of network traffic. At the same time commercial digital services have helped boost the sales of video and music in the âGlobal Northâ according to figures released at the beginning of the year. In the UK, for instance, digital sales of video grew by 40% in 2013, helping to offset a 6.8% decline in sales of physical formats (Anon. 2014). In the same year, the German music companies recorded a rise by 11.7% of digital revenues, providing the industry with its first growth of income in15 years (Anon., n.d.). Even though nobody in the media industry will ever admit it, this development is paradoxically a triumph of the pirates. When millions around the globe started to share music, movies, software, and digital books via the Internet in the late 1990s, there was very little opportunity to get these media products in a legitimate way on the Internet. If piracy has accomplished nothing else, it has forced the international media companies to start thinking about how they can allow their customers ways to see films, listen to music, download software, or read books in a timely, easy-to-use and affordable fashion â at least in the affluent countries of the âGlobalNorth,â Western Europe, North America, and the more developed countries in Asia. This is a not the âtriumph of the piratesâ that is referred to in the title of this essay, though. This is about nothing more than about the convenience of theconsumers. And even though the majority of people who pirate copyrighted content might have had nothing else in mind but just that â convenience â this is not the most important feat that the pirates accomplished. What they did, however, was taking a key property of digital media and turn it into the subject of a social, political, and economic debate. Piracy can be readin a multitude of ways: as a leveler of economic inequality; as an invitationto free speech, as an act of resistance or simply as an opportunity for newtypes of business. But in the end, piracy is about authorship and access, and often the only opportunity to participate in a global conversation and tomake yourself heard. The global media pirates challenge the established way of how content is distributed, a model that had already been put intoperil by the emergence of the Internet. In a way, they were doing what the Internet â as a medium that has turned distribution into the copying fromone server computer to another â seemed to want. Here, the digital machines that â according to Kittler â know no morals, have no subjectivity, possess no âcontentâ seem to inscribe their valuesystem (or rather its lack of a value system) onto the way large parts of the global population consume culture. But piracy also made it clear that we do not have to accept or even prop up what this new technological apparatus seems to suggest. As Evgeny Morozov has pointed out time and again in his critique of âInternet-centricism,â ultimately it is up to the users of the net to shape it. What Morozov writes about the socio-political impact of the net also goes for the way we think about and handle online piracy: âPerhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces â as well as many others â simultaneously. But as far as laws of the Internet go, this is all we know. Which of the numerous forces unleashed by the web will prevail in a particular social and political context is impossible to tell without first getting a thorough theoretical understanding of that contextâ (Morozov 2011, 29). Simplistic and ultimately essentialist generalizations about an inherent logic of the net might even keep us from fully realizing its possibilities. As Steven Johnson has argued, what the Internet wants isâa lot of contradictory thingsâ (Morozov and Johnson 2013), and it is up tous to figure out which of these contradictory things we actually want to happen and to become part of our lives. The battle about piracy is one of the most prominent conflicts where the conflict between how these digital networks function and what they dowith us, is played out, but it is by far not the only one, and most likely not even the most important one anymore. US whistleblower Edward Snowden made us realize through his disclosures about the global spying that the NSA and other secret service undertake that potentially a large part ofour electronic communications can be intercepted and stored. Here we have another instance where the dialectic of the new digital technologiesachieve crucial importance. As with piracy, in the phenomenon of globalsurveillance the distinct afffordances and characteristics of digital media play out â not in a clean room of âcyberspace,â but in a specif. ic social contextwith its own set of norms, values, and practices, and that can be a messy process. As with piracy, digital networks might have encouraged certain kinds of control and surveillance. Their existence and their practice are not lawsof nature, however. Just as online piracy has been shaped and transformedby the resistance that it has encountered in the last decade and a half â a resistance of which the cease and desist letter I mentioned at the beginning of this essay were part of â so the global surveillance will be shaped bysimilar dialectics. Hence, the mass spying that Snowden exposed might encompass the conditions of its own downfall: While only digital networks made this kind of mass spying feasible, the net also facilitate the large-scale leaking of information that was supposed to stay secret. Piracy did its part in shaping the discourse about intellectual property in the age of digital media by acting as the most excessive Other to the far-reaching ownership demands of the MPAA, the Business Software Alliance. and all these other media industry lobby groups â without actually and outspokenly participating in that debate. Notes 1. âI have begun a large process at home of ripping all of my and my wifeâsCDs, and storing them in one archive. Then, using Appleâs iTunes, or a wonderful program called Andromeda, we can build diffferent play lists ofour music: Bach, Baroque, Love Songs, Love Songs of Signif.icant Others â the potential is endless. And by reducing the costs of mixing play lists, these technologies help build a creativity with play lists that is itself independently valuable. Compilations of songs are creative and meaningful in their own rightâ (Lessig 2004, 203). 2. This pattern â then using the uniquely Asian medium of VDCs â had been sharply observed in the context of North Asia already ten years earlier byKelly Hu in an essay on the appropriation of Japanese television shows byhighly specialized fan audiences in Hong Kong in 2004, long before this became an international and global phenomenon (Hu 2004). 3. It speaks to the lucidity of global pop culture that American DJ Diplo and British singer M.I.A. debunked as early as 2004 these â often alleged, but never proven â connections between terrorism and piracy with the title of a mix tape called âTerrorism Funds Terrorism Vol. I.â The compilation contained âmash-upâ versions of original songs by M.I.A. from her debut album with samples from songs from artists such as the Bangles, Jay-Z, Salt-n-Pepa, Missy Elliott, Ciara, LL Cool J, and Cutty Ranks. In keeping with the motto of the compilation, it was never officially released because of irresolvable copyright issues. Bibliography Alford, William P. 1995. To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offfence: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Anon. N.d. âDeutscher Musikmarkt wÃchst insgesamt um 1,2 Prozent.â Bundesverband Musikindustrie. http://www.musikindustrie.de/statistik/. Anon. 2014. âDigital Services Boost Sales of Video and Music Sales.â BBC website, 1 January. http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25559821. BaumgÃrtel, Tilman. 2006. âThe Culture of Piracy in the Philippines.â Presented at Asian Edition: A Conference on Media Piracy and Intellectual Property in South East Asia, University of the Philippines Film Institute, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines, 24 November. http://www.asian-edition.org/piracyinthephilippines.pdf. BaumgÃrtel, Tilman. 2012. âThe Piracy Generation: Media Piracy and Independent Film inSoutheast Asia.â In May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay, eds., Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 195-208. Bold, Bianca. 2011. âThe Power of Fan Communities: An Overview of Fansubbing In Brazil.â TraduÃÃo em Revista 11.2: 1-19 Chaudhry, Peggy, and Alan Zimmerman. 2010.The Economics of Counterfeit Trade: Governments, Consumers, Pirates, and Intellectual Property Rights. Berlin: Springer. Dery, Mark. 2014. âCulture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs.â Shovelware Blog. http://markdery.com/?page_id=154.Dewey, Caitlin. 2013. ââGame of Thronesâ Exec Says Piracy Is âBetter Than an Emmy.â He Hasa Point.â Washington Post, 9 August. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/09/game-of- thrones-exec-says-piracy-is-better-than-an-emmy-he-has-a-point/.
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Torres, John. 2012. âPiracy Boom Boom.â In May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay, eds., Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 63-72. Treverton, Gregory F., et al. 2009. Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Vandresen, Monique. 2012. âFree Culture.â Lost in Translation: International Journal of Communication 6: 626-642. 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 NEUES BUCH: Schleifen. Zur Geschichte und Ãsthetik des Loops, Kulturverlag Kadmos 2015, 24 Euro 90 http://loopsbuch.org/ âEine Art Grundlagenwerkâ taz - die tageszeitung âInspirierendâ Groove âLesenswertâ Thump/Vice "Ein immerhin ÃuÃerst informatives und lesenswertes Buch Ãber einen tatsÃchlich bis dato kaum beachteten (oder angesichts von moderner Sample-Technologie zu selbstverstÃndlich genommenen) Eckpfeilers moderner Musikkultur." Der Freitag âThough books have been written about the foundations of electronic music, this is the first to focus solely on loops. Whatâs surprising is that the history of this elemental structure has been so long overlooked.â National Public Radio (NPR) Berlin # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org