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The rhetorics and myths of anti-piracy campaigns: criminalization, moral pedagogy and capitalist property relations in the classroom

Keele University, UK, m.yar{at}crim.keele.ac.uk

This article deals with current attempts by copyright industries (music, motion pictures and computer software) to challenge and criminalize practices of piracy and copyright theft, especially in relation to internet usage. A number of anti-piracy campaigns, all aimed at schoolchildren, are critically examined. It is argued that their advocacy of copyright and their corresponding objections to piracy rest on a number of rhetorical strategies which encode capitalist and individualist conceptions of property, creativity and rights. These strategies are elucidated and examined so as to draw attention to their contingent, partial and mythical character. Alternative understandings of intellectual expression are mobilized so as to delineate a case for legitimizing, rather than demonizing, cultural copying practices.

Key Words: capitalism • copyright • intellectual property • internet • myth • rhetoric • piracy

New Media & Society, Vol. 10, No. 4, 605-623 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1461444807087911


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