1st Edition
Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America Rethinking Creativity and the Common Good
Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America is the first sustained effort to present an alternative framework for understanding piracy and contemporary challenges to global discourses on intellectual property (IP) in the Americas.
While piracy might just look like theft and derivative reproduction from the perspective of many right-holders, the contributors to this volume go beyond this economic-driven logic and show how practices of copying are in fact practices of reinvention that reflect the rich social networks and forms of creativity, authorship, commerce, and consumption that characterize informal economies. From a perspective informed by contemporary scenarios in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, and the United States, they engage in a discussion of alternatives that—predicated on the importance of protecting culture—allow for other ways of conceiving prosperity at local, national, regional, and global levels. Examples discussed include video games, clothing, trinkets, music, film, TV, and books.
Designed to help understand the broader implications of IP and piracy for the field of Latin American studies, this book will be a major contribution to Global South studies, as well as to the growing bibliography on globalization, informal markets, and piracy.
Introduction
Juan Poblete and Víctor Goldgel-Carballo
1. How Trinkets Became Counterfeits: Value and Intellectual Property in a Low-income Market in Brazil
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado
2. The Piracy Problem: Indigeneity, Hybridity, and the Racial Politics of IP Enforcement in Guatemala
Kedron Thomas
3. Piracy and/as Legitimate Business
Phillip Penix-Tadsen
4. Piracy as Media Practice: The Informal Market of Music and Videos in Peru
Santiago Alfaro Rotondo
5. Context as Content in Chilean Community Media
Jennifer Ashley
6. ‘Feeling Pirate’ as Media Affect in Mexican-American Experience
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
7. From Piracy as a Crime to Piracy as a Necessity: Territorial Inequalities and the Socially Necessary Market in Brazil
Fábio Tozi
8. Book Piracy in Chile and the Proletarianization of Literature in Pedro Lemebel
Juan Poblete
9. Pirate Book Aesthetics in Contemporary Argentina
Víctor Goldgel-Carballo
10. Between Abundance and Appropriation: Indeterminate Critiques of Global IP Schemes
Zac Zimmer
11. The Creative Copy: Agency and Fashion at a Market for Counterfeited Garments
Matías Dewey
Appendix: A Primer on Intellectual Property
Juan Poblete
Biography
Víctor Goldgel-Carballo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Juan Poblete is Professor of Latin/o American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz.
"The essays in this collection expertly localize unauthorized use in Latin America, integrating on-the-ground production with globalizing discourses of circulatory legitimacy. The book should be required reading for those interested in the increasingly important role of digital textuality in emerging economies." — Alexander S. Dent, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The George Washington University
