Special Issue on Consuming the ‘Illegal’: Situating Online Piracy in Everyday Experience Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (Vol 19, no 1, February 2013) Guest editors: Robert Jewitt, University of Sunderland, UK; Jason Rutter, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium; Majid Yar, University of Hull, UK Research interest on peer-to-peer file exchange through services such as BitTorrent and file lockers such a MegaUpload have tended to view piracy as a product of legislative, criminal, behavioural or business contexts. It has often adopted a priori assumptions that consumers of pirated goods are ‘deviant’, ‘unethical’ or demonstrate consumer...
The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property
My recent post mentioning the the rhetoric and routine of file sharing prompted me to revisit a paper by Majid Yar from a couple of years ago. Yar is a criminologist in the UK specialising in internet crime and has published several pieces on intellectual property and piracy. In his paper, ‘The rhetorics and myths of anti-piracy campaigns’, he looks as some reoccurring themes in anti-piracy educational materials used in different parts of the world. From this he identifies four trope (or ‘myths’) which are routinely present in these literatures: Trope 1: the myth of property as a natural...
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