Join us for a talk and discussion with Alexander Dent, Associate Professor at George Washington University, on his book Digital Pirates: Policing Intellectual Property in Brazil (Stanford 2020).
About the book
Digital Pirates examines the unauthorized creation, distribution, and consumption of movies and music in Brazil. Dr. Alexander Sebastian Dent offers a new definition of piracy as indispensable to current capitalism alongside increasing global enforcement of intellectual property (IP). Complex and capricious laws might prohibit it, but piracy remains a core activity of the twenty-first century.
Combining the tools of linguistic and cultural anthropology with models from media studies and political economy, Digital Pirates reveals how the dynamics of IP and piracy serve as strategies for managing the gaps between texts—in this case, digital content. Dent's analysis includes his fieldwork in and around São Paulo with pirates, musicians, filmmakers, police, salesmen, technicians, policymakers, politicians, activists, and consumers. Rather than argue for rigid positions, he suggests that Brazilians are pulled in multiple directions according to the injunctions of international governance, localized pleasure, magical consumption, and economic efficiency. Through its novel theorization of "digital textuality," this book offers crucial insights into the qualities of today's mediascape as well as the particularized political and cultural norms that govern it. The book also shows how twenty-first century capitalism generates piracy and its enforcement simultaneously, while producing fraught consumer experiences in Latin America and beyond.
This STS (Science and Technology Studies) Book Talk is organized by Dr. Liliana Gil as part of the Comparative Studies Seminar in Technology and Culture and is open to the entire Ohio State community. To receive the Zoom link, please pre-register with your Ohio State credentials. Participants may opt for joining in person at Hagerty Hall 451.
This event is supported by the Center for Latin American Studies, the Feminist Science and Technology Studies & Social Justice Working Group at the Humanities Institute, and the Department of Comparative Studies.
This event was supported in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Title VI NRC funding. The content of this event does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.
