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+title: Politicising Piracy -  Creating Uncoditional Demand
+has_sessions:
+---
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+Politicising Piracy topic has a two-fold goal: to understand cultural piracy as a form of political practice and to look at various practices of piracy from their specific socio-economic context of emergence, their technological underpinnings and their specific forms of political articulation. 
+
+## Cultural and knowledge piracy in the technological, legal and economic context 
+
+There is a tendency to conceive of cultural and knowledge piracy as a phenomenon of recent date, largely in connection with pirating of popular cultural works or scholarly works, by means of an industrial-grade, home or personal copying device. However, the practice of copying is co-originary with the technologies of recording. Before the introduction of the printing press manuscripts were hand-copied, with the invention of movable type printing the books started to be mass-copied, and in the digital domain every action - downloading and opening a file, visiting a web page, editing a text - entails copying from one part of computer environment to another. The difference is that while before very few actors had access to the copying device, nowadays copying devices are ubiquotous and networked, so the boundaries between reading, copying and sharing are more permeable. However, the context of piracy is only partly defined by technologies. 
+
+It is equally defined by law that treats cultural works as property and protects them by copyright. Copyright essentially regulates who and under what terms has a right to copy, distribute and access cultural works. Digitisation has both expanded accessiblity of cultural works beyond the limitations of physical items, where an item can be copied and distributed at zero marginal cost. But it has also allowed for various forms of control and enforcement of rights by technological means, including through copy-protection measures and centralisation through streaming. The attempts to stop sharing have largely proven inefficient unless there is a high level of control over communication channels and draconian fines.
+
+In a telling example, in the 1984 Betamax case, Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Company sued Sony for aiding copyright infringement with their Betamax videorecorders. Sony won. The court decision in favor of fair use rather than copyright infringement laid the legal ground for home recording technology as the foundation of future analog, and subsequently digital, content sharing. Five years later, Sony bought its first major Hollywood studio: Columbia Pictures. In 2004 Sony Music Entertainment merged with Bertelsmann Music Group to create Sony BMG. However, things changed as Sony became the content producer and we entered the age of the discrete and the digital. Another five years later, in 2009, Sony BMG sued Joel Tenenbaum for downloading and then sharing 31 songs. The jury awarded US$675,000 to the music companies (US$22,000 per song) (Wikipedia 2015).
+
+More fundamentally piracy is a consequence of the social regulation of access to culture that is primarily rooted in the commodified system of culture and knowledge economy. Central instrument in that regulation over the last two centuries is intellectual property in the form of copyright. Copyright has a fundamentally economic function – to unambiguously establish individualized property in the products of creative labor. Once a legal title is unambiguously assigned, there is a person holding the property right with whose consent the contracting, commodification, and marketing of the work can proceed (Bently 1994). By the beginning of the 20th century, copyright expanded to a number of other forms of creativity, transcending its primarily literary and scientific ambit and becoming part of the broader set of intellectual property rights that are fundamental to the functioning and positioning of capitalist enterprise. The corporatization of the production of culture and knowledge thus brought about a decisive break from the Romantic model that singularized the authorship in the person of the author. The production of cultural commodities nowadays involves a number of creative inputs from both credited (but mostly unwaged) and uncredited (but mostly waged) contributors. However, the copyright has facilitated a rise of rights-holding monopolies, who can neither provide a viable subsistence economy for authors nor optimal access to the cultural works, as their mission is primarily defined by their business bottom line. The level of concentration in industries primarily concerned with various forms of intellectual property rights is staggering. The film industry is a US$88 billion industry dominated by 6 major studios. The recorded music industry is an almost US$20 billion industry dominated by only 3 major labels. The publishing industry is a US$120 billion industry where the leading 10 companies earn in revenues more than the next 40 largest publishing groups. Academic publishing in particular draws the state of play into q stark relief. It's a US$10 billion industry dominated by 5 publishers and financed up to 75% from library subscriptions (Larivière 2015).
+
+Furthermore, culture and knowledge economy is part and parcel of the global economy, where the most affluent economies also command the bulk of global science and research investment -- and are able to wield intellectual property rights to maximise value they can extract from that fact in the international division of labor. As already pointed out, the transition to digital networks has expanded accessibility of cultural works beyond the distribution of physical items. Yet, in that expansion of access, the traditional institutional avenues of decommodified access to culture and knowledge -- e.g. libraries and universities -- were denied (American Library Association 2012) to provide free access to digital text and the fees charged by the publishers became exorbitant. Thus the new digital cultural and knowledge economy has denied access to knowledge to readers following territorial, institutional and economic divides, motivating them thus to create their own piratical systems of access by sharing and building cultural repositories of culture and knowledge, doing for access in the digital world what public libraries were not allowed to do. At the same time, many cutural and knowledge producers are denied wage by the copyright industries and nowadays increasingly platform-operating intermediaries, thus becoming doubly denied both the access to the works they themselves require to produce and the means to buy them. It comes as no surprise that, particularly in the knowledge domain, the authors are the most avowed advocates of universal open access and many accept the piracy as the next-best solution to the systemic denial.
+
+## Cultural and knowledge piracy in the historical context, the free encyclopedia
+
+Piracy is an illicit act of copying and dissemination of cultural works that are done in contravention of law or authority. When we talk today of illegal copying, we primarily mean an infringement of the legal rights of authors and publishers. There's an immediate assumption that the infringing practice of illegal copying and distribution falls under the domain of juridical sanction, that it is a matter of law. Yet if we look to the history of copyright, the illegality of copying was a political matter long before it became a matter of law. Publisher's rights, author's rights, and mechanisms of reputation – the three elements that are fundamental to the present-day copyright system – all have their historic roots in the context of absolutism and early capitalism in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Before publishers and authors were given a temporary monopoly over the exploitation of their publications instituted in the form of copyright, they were were operating in a system where they were forced to obtain a privilege to print books from royal censors (Biagioli 2002). The transition from the privilege tied to the publisher to the privilege tied to the natural person of the author would unfold only later. 
+
+In the United Kingdom this transition occurred as the guild of printers, Stationers' Company, failed to secure the extension of its printing monopoly and thus, in order to continue with its business, decided to advocate the introduction a copyright for the authors instead. This resulted in the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709 (Rose 2010), also known as the Statute of Anne. The censoring authority and enterprising publishers now proceeded in lockstep to isolate the author as the central figure in the regulation of literary and scientific production. Not only did the author receive exclusive rights to the work, the author was also made the identifiable subject of scrutiny, censorship and political sanction by the absolutist state. (Foucault 1980)
+
+Before the efforts to internationalise and harmonise intellectual property rights got on track with the 1883 Paris Convention on the Protection of Industrial Property and the ensuing 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the copyright was protected only as far as the jurisdiction of the copyright-granting national authority carried. Copyrighted works and patented inventions were reproduced freely in foreign markets, contributing to the edification of the people and the economic development of societies. A century later, with the post-socialist economic globalisation instituted in free trade agreements, the internationalisation and harmonisation of intellectual property rights started to codify and enforce the unequal exchange between unevenly developed economies and provide legal basis for enclosure of intangible commons. Making a cultural expression an exclusive property of someone was always a dubious proposition. It might have been justified to secure autonomy from patronage. But as an instrument to secure livelihood in the generalised market relations, for most artists it proved a pitiful substitution for wage. And even worse, as a mechanism of protection of collective rights and larger social interests in the conditions of asymmetry of economic power, it failed miserably (Shiva 2001, Perleman 2001). As a mechanism of exclusion, it granted large intellectual property holders in the global north a capacity to concentrate economic power to the detriment of the creators and recipients. 
+
+Against this historical background, cultural and knowledge piracy as a practice assumes a different relief. It is not simply reducible to free loading in order to gain access to something that is the property of others, but challenges the very property-form as a form of regulation of social production of culture and knowledge. In that way it is not different in nature, only in kind to challenges of how privatisation, property and exclusion regulates social production of food, housing, health or education. The rise of digital networks and expansion of accessiblity has only exacerbated that eminently political tension.
+
+## Piracy as a radical demand
+
+The following sessions start from an understanding of piracy as a practice articulating an unconditional demand. In this perspective, piracy calls for the abolition of property and commodification as forms of exclusion from the communal wealth. In issuing that radical demand, it is neither appealing to a grey-zone or nor asking for a conditional toleration, but it is issuing an unconditional demand. That makes it eminently political. It's a form of politics of prescription that re-articulates the terms of the debate and cuts the political terrain in two - one can only be for or against the abolition of intellectual property. Such political intervention does not seek to open "the middle way", but demands that everyone takes sides. 
+
+In the face of historic opening provided by the technological change for commoning and socialising the cultural and knowledge production, that necessity of taking sides only comes clearer and more urgent to the fore than before. Such situations are not unprecedented. For instance, the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune of 1871, its mere “working existence” (Marx 1871), a brief moment of “communal luxury” set in practice (Ross 2010), demanded that, in spite of any circumstances and reservations, one take a side. And such is our present moment too. It's a resistance to the rise of Googles and Amazons to position of new, platformed intermediaries that control the leavers of cultural and knowledge production.
+
+The sessions thus propose to learn from various forms of cultural and knowledge piracy from three aspects - what are the politicising interventions into the terrain of struggle over cultural and knowledge production and access that they make, what are the technological principles they base their strategy on, and what are the forms of legal prosecution they face. They also look to piracy, as a pratice of mass politics of redistribution and socialisation of production, as opposed to politics of counter-surveillance and leaking, which reserves counter-power only for a small number of savvy hacker figures.
+
+
+## References
+
+American Library Association, 2012. An open letter to America’s publishers from ALA President Maureen Sullivan [WWW Document]. News and Press Center. URL http://www.ala.org/news/2012/09/open-letter-america%E2%80%99s-publishers-ala-president-maureen-sullivan (accessed 1.13.18).
+
+Bently, L., 1994. Copyright and the Death of the Author in Literature and Law. *The Modern Law Review* 57, 973–986. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1994.tb01989.x
+
+Biagioli, M., 2002. From book censorship to academic peer review. *Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures* 12, 11–45.
+
+Foucault, M., 1980. What is an Author?, in: *Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.* Cornell University Press, pp. 113–138.
+
+Larivière, V., Haustein, S., Mongeon, P., 2015. The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. *PLoS ONE 10*, e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.
+
+Marx, K., 1871. The Civil War in France [WWW Document]. *Marxists.org.* URL https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ (accessed 4.10.17).
+
+Perleman, M., 2003. The Political Economy of Intellectual Property. *Monthly Review*. URL https://monthlyreview.org/2003/01/01/the-political-economy-of-intellectual-property/ (accessed 2.28.20).
+
+Rose, M., 2010. The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright:, in: *Privilege and Property, Essays on the History of Copyright*. Open Book Publishers, pp. 67–88.
+
+Shiva, V., 2001. *Protect or Plunder: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights*. Zed Books, London ; New York : Dhaka : Bangkok : Halifax, N.S. : Cape Town.
+
+Wikipedia, 2015. Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. *Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.*