Occupying The Law: "Piracy", Streaming, And Intellectual Property Rights

Abstract

This article addresses intellectual property laws as a set of regulations made up of porous relations between legal and illegal categories. In addition to a configuration permeated by behaviors and norms linked to a legal rationality, I argue that the rules involving the ownership of the creations of the intellect are crossed, interdicted, molded, edited and transformed from negotiations with agents located in fields where the legal and the illegal are interrelated. I analyze ways that intellectual property laws are colonized and resignified through my ethnographic study with (video and music) streaming platforms and digital “piracy”, in which I identify the permeability of legal /illegal fields, not only in the constitution of the law, but also in the experiences of “pirate” actors and operators of legal services.