Piracy

Book

* Adrian Johns. Piracy. The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. University of Chicago Press, 2010

URL = http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226401188

Description

"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. Written with a historian’s flair for narrative and sparkling detail, the book swarms throughout with characters of genius, principle, cunning, and outright criminal intent: in the wars over piracy, it is the victims—from Charles Dickens to Bob Dylan—who have always been the best known, but the principal players—the pirates themselves—have long languished in obscurity, and it is their stories especially that Johns brings to life in these vivid pages." (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226401188)

Concept

Is P2P Filesharing piracy, as the multinationals living from intellectual property rights claim?

Discussion

This interview with Lawrence Liang makes important points at this discussion, which by itself is already biased because of how it frames the issue.

URL = http://icommons.org/2007/02/07/a-dmc-with-lawrence-liang/

http://icommons.org/2007/02/07/a-dmc-with-lawrence-liang/

A DMC with Lawrence Liang

Lawrence Liang, , by Frederick Noronha, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0News just in! We've confirmed that Lawrence Liang, iCommons' newest board member will be attending the iSummit 07 in Dubrovnik. Liang is a legal researcher with the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. His key areas of interest are in law, technology and culture, and he has written extensively on the topic of piracy, especially within the framework of the developing world. In light of the discussions on piracy on the iCommons mailing list (sign up here), we thought we'd find out what Lawrence had to say on the topic.

iCommons: There is an advert played before every movie screening in South African cinemas, the basic message is "you don't steal a handbag, you don't steal a cell phone - why would you steal a movie or music?" - it essentially equates piracy as 'stealing'. But why do you think piracy is not stealing?

Lawrence: In a recent event that was conducted in Bangalore, Sebastian Lutgert, an artist based in Berlin created a set of posters called the 'Good Questions' series. One of them asked the question, "Why is piracy called stealing even when the original does not disappear"? I guess that would be my most basic response. As we all know by now, the world of intangibles is marked by the fact that information is non-rivalrous and non-competitive as pubic goods go, and the basic assumption behind the word 'stealing' emerges from the world of the tangible. While it may be true that there are forms of 'information' sharing which are treated as being illegal in law, they still require a more precise definition since the existing one is not a value neutral one and it ends up framing the entire debate itself.

The way that an issue is framed sometimes ensures that half of the time, whether the debate is won or lost; once a debate is joined by certain terms, then the debate is already lost. Thus when you have examples that argue that there is no difference between stealing a cell phone and sharing music online, it works with the simplistic premise that a theft is a theft. But if there is indeed a difference between downloading a digital MP3 file and stealing a cell phone, then the theft discourse erases the difference by way of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pirated DVDs, by JasonUnbound, CC BY-NC 2.0iCommons: In the letter which started the heated debate, Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: "A world without our secret public libraries would be a poorer world. It would be a world in which very few people read, very few have books, and only those who could own things were the ones who could share them. It would also mean a world in which, eventually, very few people write books. So, instead of more, there would in the end be less culture to go around. The more you own, the less you can share." In relation to this text, what are your ideas on the 'need' or 'propensity' towards piracy in the developing world?

Lawrence: Piracy is a fact of life in most developing countries. Now we can either begin with a normative or moral position which decries anything which is illegal or we can attempt to provide thicker descriptions of the ways in which the legal and the illegal intersect in most developing countries. The content industry would then argue that this is an unethical and immoral act, thereby dabbling with older and more familiar modes through which the moral character of entire cultures can be written off.

For liberals, the usual argument which people find acceptable is the argument that links income to piracy, and that is a straightforward argument which is true for most parts. But that is only a part of the story. The challenge that interests me is to locate histories of piracy within larger histories of technology, culture and society, which pays close attention to questions of subjectivity, and the histories of knowledge and cultural practices in countries marked by sharp inequalities. This reframes the question beyond the 'need for piracy' kind of framework.

iCommons: Would you say that the concept of 'ownership' or 'property' in the developing world is different to the developed world? If so, how is it different?

Lawrence: Rather framing it through the perspective of developed v. developing, or western v. non-western, I would argue that there are different cultural histories of ownership.

The dominant tradition of looking at the idea of ownership is from the perspective of making a claim of exclusion. This underlies the heart of property and personhood within certain traditions, notably from Locke downwards. The idea that 'my own' could possibly refer not merely to a sovereign claim but also to a relationship, conflicts with the world of property norms where a reference to an 'own' is an act that makes a claim of absolute possession; declares the ability to exclude others and asserts the legal ability to alienate what you own.

And yet at the same time it seems that there indeed does exists a large set of claims within diverse cultural traditions where a claim towards something or someone may lie more in the domain of your relation to the person or object than as a claim of possession. In nehiyawin (Cree cosmology) to refer to something as 'mine' does not necessarily imply ownership, but refers instead to a relational proximity to objects (animate and inanimate) and beings, and the accompanying responsibilities and obligations that emerge from such a relational proximity.

Thinking of our relation to the world of knowledge and culture via the trope of proximity enables us to rethink our relations to our work, to ourselves and to each other - not as distinct sets of legal relations bound together by the idea of rights, but as a continuum which blurs the boundaries between rights, obligations and relationalities. Consider for instance the following statements, each of which refer to a certain claim which sounds deceptive similar but are in fact exist on very different ethical and legal registers:

This is my Pen This is my Friend This is my Poem

While the first statement refers to the classical conception of the claims of possessive individualism where the self/owner exist as inter-changeable concepts. This is 'my' pen and hence I own it.

The second statement takes us into the domain of relational proximities where an assertion of someone being your friend does not lead to an assumption, either of ownership or of exclusion, but into the domain of your closeness/ or apnaapan that you share with your fried. Thus the statement that this is my friend could well be mapped in terms of its presence in Hindi as Mere Apne or a sense of 'own', which leads to an understanding of how close you are to someone.

The third statement is perhaps the most deceptive because to assert that "this is my poem" within the social imaginary of intellectual property is to make a claim that sounds very much like "this is my Pen", whereas in fact it might be more accurate to think of it in terms of "this is my friend". And it is in this space where poems look like pens, that friendships get lost and property takes over.

iCommons: How do you think we can reconcile the IP interests of the developed world with the need for less restrictive IP in the developing world?

Lawrence: From an institutional perspective this could mean a range of initiatives including putting the agenda of human rights, public interest and development critically within the IP discourse. And some of the notable developments on this front include the WIPO development agenda, the proposed A2K treaty process etc.

And from the perspective of voluntary efforts, the promotion of initiatives likes the Free Software and Creative Commons movements. And the task of critical IP scholars would also be to provide accounts of media practices in developing countries which do not recycle demonizing and criminalizing accounts of piracy." (http://icommons.org/2007/02/07/a-dmc-with-lawrence-liang/)