Digital Pirates examines the unauthorized creation, distribution, and consumption of movies and music in Brazil. Alexander Sebastian Dent offers a new definition of piracy as indispensable to current capitalism alongside increasing global enforcement of intellectual property (IP). Complex and capricious laws may prohibit it, but piracy has become a core activity of the twenty-first-century.
Combining the tools of linguistic and cultural anthropology with models from media studies and political economy, Digital Pirates reveals how the dynamics of IP and piracy serve as strategies for managing the gaps between texts--in this case, digital content. Dent's analysis includes his fieldwork in and around S o Paulo with pirates, musicians, filmmakers, police, salesmen, technicians, policy makers, politicians, activists, and consumers. Rather than argue for rigid positions, he suggests that Brazilians are pulled in multiple directions according to the injunctions of international governance, localized pleasure, magical consumption, and economic efficiency. Through its novel theorization of "digital textuality," this book offers crucial insights into the qualities of today's mediascape as well as the particularized political and cultural norms that govern it. The book also shows how 21st century capitalism simultaneously generates piracy and its enforcement, while producing fraught consumer experiences--in Latin America and beyond.