Anti-piracy policies and online film circulation: The Italian context, between formality and informality

The main purpose of the chapter is to show how the concepts of formal and informal economies may represent very important theoretical tools, which can provide new perspectives on digital piracy research. More specifically, it illustrates how the categories used to analyse the interactions between formality and informality (functions, effects and controls) can provide an innovative theoretical framework for the study of anti-piracy communication, and its relationships with online film circulation. The chapter is structured in four parts. Section 1 analyses how the ‘economic issue’ has affected the piracy debate in past years, focusing in particular on the polarization between commercial and non-commercial piracy and the controversial question of financial harm. Section 2 discusses how the study of formality and informality, as well as their interactions, provides a multidimensional approach and allows us to surpass rigid polarizations, thus accounting fully for a complex and unstable scenario. Having then provided a brief overview of the main features of the online media ecology in Italy, with special emphasis on the audiovisual sector in the third section, the final part analyses some recent Italian anti-piracy initiatives in order to illustrate how formality depicts informality and, most importantly, how formal actors are shaping the development of the digital distribution sector.