“Stop, Thief!” Media Industries, File Sharing and the Rhetoric of Anti-piracy Campaigns

As Andrew Currah (2006) has effectively summarized, “the record labels and studios have endeavoured to criminalize file sharing and so deter consumers from participating in P2P networks. They have done so by filing lawsuits against the providers of file-sharing software, and more recently, against consumers who are believed to be providing large amounts on a P2P network. […] In addition, the record labels and studios have constructed elaborate public awareness and educational campaigns (across the media and in US high schools), which frame P2P networks as spaces of danger and moral contagion where youngsters are at risk of being exposed to subversive digital content such as pornography, viruses and spyware. The overall attempt has been to construct an ethical code of practice surrounding digital content – that P2P file sharing is morally wrong and economically damaging to creative industries – to encourage consumers to ‘self-regulate’ their behaviour (in a rather Foucauldian fashion) along lines that respect the interests of copyright capital.” Starting from these remarks, my paper will focus on the discursive strategies through which the media oligopoly has constructed the “piracy” phenomenon in order to oppose it, with particular attention to the Italian context and to movie piracy in the wider context of digital piracy (although Italian anti-piracy campaigns will be related to other international campaigns and digital piracy will be related to analog piracy). I will particularly discuss: the construction of “piracy” in anti-piracy campaigns (do they distinguish between piracy in commercial economies and file sharing in sharing [Anderson, Lessig] or informal [Lobato] economies? In which sense does the concept of piracy overlap with the concept of theft? What kind of relationship between piracy and creativity [Lessig] emerges from the campaigns?); the false myth of the “original” (Goodman, Genette, Prieto) in anti-piracy campaigns; the relationships between anti-piracy campaigns and the participatory or RW culture (Jenkins, Lessig); the relationship between anti-piracy campaigns and the contemporary forms of film circulation (movie theater, DVDs, legal download or streaming, unlawful file sharing and streaming); the role of parody (UGC) in understanding and analyzing the anti-piracy campaigns.