Piracy_Infrastructure

This paper is a part of the Yale Access to Knowledge Country Reports. 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. The paper is also available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436229

Liang-Piracy, Infrastructure and Creativity.pdf — PDF document, 1410Kb