Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood. Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

In this original study of intellectual property rights (IPR) in relation to state capacity, Dimitrov analyzes this puzzle by offering the first systematic analysis of all IPR enforcement avenues in China, across all IPR subtypes. He shows that the extremely high volume of enforcement provided for copyrights and trademarks is unfortunately of a low quality, and as such serves only to perpetuate IPR violations. In the area of patents, however, he finds a low volume of high-quality enforcement. In light of these findings, the book develops a theory of state capacity that conceptualizes the Chinese state as simultaneously weak and strong. The book draws on extensive fieldwork in China and five other countries, as well as on 10 unique IPR enforcement datasets that exploit previously unexplored sources, including case files of private investigation firms.

Mertha analyzes the impact of external political pressure on the enforcement of intellectual property rights. A useful volume for anyone interested in the actual workings of the governmental bureaucracy in China, as well as for those who want to gain insights into the practical aspects of IPR enforcement.

In Combating Piracy: Intellectual Property Theft and Fraud,Jay S. Albanese and his contributors provide new analyses ofintellectual property theft and how perpetrators innovate and adapt toshifting opportunities. The cases described here illustrate thewide-ranging nature and the spectrum of persons involved in piracy ofstolen copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents, from thesoftware industry to pharmaceuticals. The global reach of theproblem requires international remedies that include changed attitudes,public education, increasing the likelihood of apprehension, andreducing available opportunities. The contributors show that piracy isa form of fraud, a form of organized crime, a white-collar crime, acriminal activity with causes we can isolate and prevent, and a globalproblem. This book examines each of these perspectives to determine howthey contribute to our understanding of the issues involved.

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.

An understanding of the changing nature of the law and practice of copyright infringement is a task too big for lawyers alone; it requires additional inputs from economists, historians, technologists, sociologists, cultural theorists and criminologists. Where is the boundary to be drawn between illegal imitation and legal inspiration? Would the answer be different for creators, artists and experts from different disciplines or fields? How have concepts of copyright infringement altered over time and how do such changes relate, if at all, to the cultural norms operating amongst creators in different fields? With such an approach, one might perhaps begin to address the vital and overarching question of whether strong copyright laws, rigorously enforced, impede rather than promote creativity. And what can be done to avoid any such adverse consequences, while maintaining the effectiveness of copyright as an incentive-mechanism for those who need it?

This book takes a Marxist approach to the study of media piracy – the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts in violation of intellectual property laws – to examine its place as an endemic feature of the cultural economy since the rise of the Internet. The author explores media piracy not in terms of its moral or legal failings, or as the inevitable by-product of digital technologies, but as a symptom of a much larger restructuring of cultural labor in the era of the Internet: labor that is digital, entrepreneurial, informal, and even illegal, and increasingly politicized. Sketching the contours of this new political economy while engaging with theories of digital media, both critical and celebratory, Mueller reveals piracy as a submerged social history of the digital world, and potentially the key to its political reimagining. This significant contribution to the study of piracy and digital culture will be vital reading for scholars and students of critical media studies, cultural studies, political theory, or digital humanities, and particularly those researching media piracy, digital labor, the digital economy, and Marxist theory.

Digital piracy. It's a global war. It touches you every day, even if you've never downloaded an MP3. And it's just begun. It's a war between media conglomerates and teenagers. A battle to the death between billion-dollar tech companies and billion-dollar content providers. It's artists battling artists, nations battling nations. This book covers it all. Every side. All the implications. The economics. The law. The ethics. The players. And above all, the realities, including the extraordinary findings of a new 57-country digital piracy research project and fresh survey and focus group research conducted specifically for this book. The media universe is shaking to its very foundations. One book helps you make sense of what's happened and what's next: Pirates of the Digital Millennium. The war over digital piracy and intellectual property is being fought everywhere on earth. It's the world's #1 technology story. It just might be today's #1 culture and entertainment story, too. Now, best-selling authors John Gantz and Jack Rochester take on the subject from every side: culture, ethics, law, business, even geopolitics. They start with facts, not uninformed opinion: facts drawn from IDC's unprecedented 57-country survey of digital piracy and its impact, as well as fresh focus group and survey research conducted specifically for this book. You'll travel from the streets of Bangkok to the halls of Congress, secret duplicating factories in Paraguay to America's suburban bedrooms. You'll discover what "fair use" really means, then sort through the morality of digital copying. You'll read every side of the debate. You'll also read something unprecedented in debates about piracy: some real, fair solutions. Will big media survive? Can you sue your customers into submission? The cultural impact of strict copyright law Does strict copyright law protect creativity or shackle it? Are we killing our #1 export market? If we can't export creative content, what can we export? DMCA: The secret history Making political sausage: How the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it through Congress Eliot Ness or the Keystone Kops? Law enforcement versus piracy: shoveling against the tide Through the fog: The future of intellectual property Sensible "grand compromises" that just might work. Publisher.

During the first decades of America’s existence as a nation, private citizens, voluntary associations, and government officials encouraged the smuggling of European inventions and artisans to the New World. At the same time, the young republic was developing policies that set new standards for protecting industrial innovations. This book traces the evolution of America’s contradictory approach to intellectual property rights from the colonial period to the age of Jackson. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Britain shared technological innovations selectively with its American colonies. It became less willing to do so once America’s fledgling industries grew more competitive. After the Revolution, the leaders of the republic supported the piracy of European technology in order to promote the economic strength and political independence of the new nation. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States became a leader among industrializing nations and a major exporter of technology. It erased from national memory its years of piracy and became the world’s foremost advocate of international laws regulating intellectual property.