Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture

28 Pages Posted: 20 Jul 2009

Date Written: July 20, 2009

Abstract

This paper raises a series of questions on the relationship between piracy, infrastructure and access to culture. Piracy has always posed a representational problem within contemporary discourses on law, public good and creativity. Piracy seems to allegorize an impure transgression, tainted by commerce and an inability to produce a discourse on itself. Pirate production of commodities and media objects fits neither a narrative of resistance nor normative critique, nor does piracy seem to fit received models of creativity or innovation. Piracy produces a series of anxieties: from states, transnational capital, and media industries and even within some liberal proponents of the public domain. The paper reframes the problem of the pirate through an examination of the content/ infrastructure binary, and questions existing assumptions about creativity, subjectivity and transformation, commodification and social life.

Keywords: Piracy, Copyright, Infrastructure, Creativity, Modernity, Culture, Cultural Production

JEL Classification: K19, K10

Suggested Citation

Liang, Lawrence, Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture (July 20, 2009). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1436229 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1436229

Lawrence Liang (Contact Author)

Alternative Law Forum ( email )

No. 122/4 Infantry Raod
Bangalore, 560001
India

HOME PAGE: http://www.altlawforum.org

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