Media Pirates: An Act of Defiance

I really enjoyed this week’s readings and the ideas of Pang and Condry, as they are something that my generation is quite familiar with, and likely participates in as well. I would like to specifically touch upon a particular idea that I felt Pang was alluding to, somewhat, in the beginning of his article, Mediating the Ethics of Technology. The following statement gives suggestion to this idea:

“While piracy operates within this hierarchy, it also defies this system by stripping copyright owners of a certain amount of control in order to place it in the hands of pirates and consumers.” (Pang 90)

I will return to this statement shortly, but first I would like to consider Condry’s article, Culture’s of Music Piracy. Condry illustrates that the sharing of music is a natural occurrence between humans. He goes onto suggest that “we can tape music off radio or the TV, enjoy music in public spaces, and borrow music from friends easily enough”, which, begs the question, if we have all of these other means of accessing music, then why is it that we feel the need to download illegal media? A potential answer to this question, I believe, can be found within the initial quote I gave from Pang. It is this notion of turning control back into the hands of the consumer that is of particular interest. From this, I have come to believe that pirating music or movies can be considered a form of culture jamming.

To clarify, culture jamming is most often seen as a method of “[undermining] the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through such practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, billboard “liberation,” and trademark infringement” (Harold 190). As such, I seek to extend the definition of culture jamming to include the concept of media pirating. This is to say that, what is occurring is far beyond what is natural between humans and is actually a subtle means to which those who participate can challenge dominant ideologies or dominant culture. In these specific cases, dominant culture being, American culture. It was discussed how many American films (Kill Bill being the featured example) appropriate a wide variety of cultures within the story lines themselves. In this way, pirates may feel that a movie doesn’t necessarily belong to those who produced it, therefore giving reason to such subversion. Furthermore, Pang suggests that “most American viewers watching Tarantino’s films know little about Asian cinemas in general” (Pang 142). So in reference to the abundance of pirating that takes place in Asian countries, the ignorant North American then pushes the Asian market to seek a distinct voice. This is of course brought to life through the millions of pirated DVDs that are created. As such, pirating music and DVDs is a form of protest against dominant culture.

With this being said, “a film is not only a commodity but also a complex system of cultural representation, in which cultural exchanges are so complex that today’s copyright discourse can never clearly differentiate between copyright infringement and cultural appropriations” (136). The pirating movement, if I may call it such, is then not necessarily a disobedient act, but is actually symbolically representative of the consumer’s desire to take control and to defy American dominance.

Annalise Moser highlights through her discussion of parades as a form of protest for women in Peru, the importance of these symbolic actions. As she terms it, democratic discourse is a method in which one seeks to have their voice heard symbolically through the public sphere (181). In this sense, pirating is a means of reaching out to the public sphere, in an effort to express a desire for greater control. In Moser’s discussion of the Peruvian women’s parade tactics, we can see how pirating “presents a reply to everyday life which is at the same time an inversion, an intensification and a manipulation of that life” (180).

To American’s we can see that “a pirated film and a pirated computer program produce the same political signification: an American product being violated by another country.” (Pang, 139) In this respect, the American crackdown on pirated music and DVDs is not necessarily an act of ethics, but rather, it is a realization that their ideologies are being challenged.


Works Cited:

Harold, Christine. “Pranking Rhetoric: “Culture Jamming” as Media Activism.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, 3 (2004): 189-211.

Moser, Annalise. “Acts of Resistance: The Performance of Women’s Grassroots Protest in Peru.” Social Movement Studies 2, 2 (2003): 177-190.

Pang, Laikwan (2004). ‘Mediating the Ethics of Technology: Hollywood and Movie Piracy.’ Culture, Theory and Critique, 45 (1): 19-32.

Pang, Laikwan (2005). ‘Copying Kill Bill’. Social Text, 23 (2): 133-153

Condry, Ian (2004). ‘Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (3): 343-363.