Response to Majid Yar's "The rhetorics and myths of anti-piracy campaigns"
Monday, October 5, 2009 by finn
The historical, cultural and politically contingency of the myths which Yar observes might not make any difference in application, as one could hardly imagine justifying human sacrifice by referring to the historical contingency of ethics!
Property as a natural right within Western society is a myth as any discourse is contingent on power relations. Just as our conception of ownership arises from the Western capitalist tradition, so do the media objects we are concerned with. One wonders how far Yar would go in his attempt to determine historically contingent rights of the individual as myths and hence irrelevant.
The industry may conceive the copying of a digital file as a lost sale, whereas Yar describes it as depriving someone of "possible opportunities to exploit proprietary control over forms of expression for commercial gain." This statement displays a particular preconception of Yar's, of the notion of authorship he subscribes to. Yar is not entirely justified in applying the work of Barthes and Foucault on authorship. Generalizing from accounts of the literary text, as informed by cultural and intertextual ideas, to how to assign monetary value to a media object seems fallacious. It is difficult to accept the idea that with the 'death of the Author' comes free usage and appropriation of their texts.
Yar is concerned with debunking the idea that without monetary incentive, people will not be encouraged to create art. Yar occupies a utopian position, ignoring social realities; a middle-class artist indulging as a hobby might be less concerned with illegal downloads than a poorer individual. This represents the idea that the 'harm' of piracy means different things depending on whose intellectual copyright is being infringed. The myth of harm can be seen to be concerned with an anti-capitalist prejudice against the large corporations involved in the music industry, whereas in a smaller genre with independent labels, the effects of piracy on the creator of the music can be more easily analysed.