I wrote this thing. I think it's pretty interesting. Maybe you will too.

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In popular culture, media piracy is frequently viewed in one of two ways: either as a total violation, akin to downloading a car, or as a worthwhile evil, providing access to culture to anyone with an internet connection and a basic understanding of how to find illegal materials. Where one falls on this issue seems roughly defined by age; older people tend to view piracy as theft, whereas in our generation (i.e. Gen Y), piracy is the norm. Piracy-as-access is a useful argument for reworking intellectual property rights (IPR), but I’d like to present a further defense: the access which piracy provides can actually lead to meaningful cultural development independent of existing cultural institutions.

In Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola’s Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, the authors present a compelling portrait of the early development of hip-hop--during the so-called Golden Age of sampling--as fundamentally reliant on the “theft” (at least in legal terms) of intellectual property (2011: 19-36). They write of the turntable’s use as “an instrument that could manipulate sound,” transforming an instrument of consumption into one of production (2011: 4). In the wake of this transformation, hip-hop artists began taking advantage of the relative lack of protection of IPR, allowing, as Siva Vaidhyanathan notes, “albums [with] a rich tapestry of sound,” created through the unrestricted use of samples from older records (McLeod & DiCola 2011: 19). In later years, as sampling was more and more legally restricted, the most popular hip-hop artists could afford to pay sample licensing fees, allowing the genre to maintain its aesthetic; however, in the early days of its development, it’s hard to imagine DJs or MCs able to pay such fees (McLeod & DiCola 2011: 125-127). In this way, the failure to enforce IPR protections allowed for the creation of a new art form, defined aesthetically by the use of pre-existing intellectual property.

There are numerous other examples of the violation of IPR informing the aesthetic of a new form of culture. One particularly strong case involves the Nigerian film industry, widely referred to as Nollywood. As Brian Larkin writes in “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy,” piracy is viewed in familiarly dichotomous terms in Nigeria: it is widely derided as harmful to indigenous media producers, and yet “many of these same people consume pirate media both privately and professionally” (2004: 297). And in a manner similar to that of hip-hop’s development, the widespread violation of IPR informed the way in which the Nigerian public interacted with art (and particularly film). Larkin notes that the continued copying of pirated material marks it with the blurring of images and the distortion of sound, as well other alterations: he writes of one film he watched which “had Chinese subtitles superimposed over Arabic ones, providing a visible inscription of the routes of media piracy” (2004: 296). Thus piracy marks the media which it provides access to with a distinct aesthetic, informing the viewer’s experience of pirated film. And this aesthetic then extended even to more “legitimate” forms of media: pirates were widely involved in the sale of locally made films, and the shared infrastructure marked these local films, too, with the aesthetic of piracy (Larkin 2004: 303). Thus the use of pirated material created an aesthetic which extended into a new form of cultural expression, i.e. Nollywood.

International media piracy didn’t just inform the aesthetic of Nollywood film, though. Larkin argues convincingly that in many ways, without the infrastructure provided by pirates, Nollywood as an industry would not have begun to exist. Piracy in Nigeria, he points out, has an infrastructure all its own, defined by the corruption of global media distribution. He elaborates:

[P]iracy develops its own circuits of distribution using officially organized media. Films

made in Hollywood and intended for distribution in an organized, domestic

circuit are copied by pirates; sent to Asia or the Middle East, where they are sub-

titled; recopied in large numbers as videocassettes, video CDs (VCDs are the

dominant technology for media storage in much of Asia), or DVDs; and then

reshipped mainly within the developing world. (Larkin 2004: 293)

This “corrupt” yet wholly effective infrastructure of distribution then came into use as a means of distributing Nollywood films: “[video] cassettes are dubbed in bulk and sold on a wholesale basis through wide-ranging networks formed when [Nigerian] films did not yet exist,” i.e. the networks created in order to distribute pirated Hollywood & Bollywood films (Larkin 2004: 302).

Thus in the early days of Nollywood film production, as during the Golden Age of sampling, the lack of meaningful protection for intellectual property actually allowed for new forms of cultural expression to arise, forms which are marked by the technologies of media piracy even as they surpass the boundaries of those technologies. In this way, we can defend practices of media piracy not only as egalitarian (vis-à-vis) the open access which they provide to culture), but as culturally productive, integral to the functioning of new forms of expression.