The Good, the Bad, and the Commons: A Critical Review of Popular Discourse on Piracy and Power During Anti-ACTA Protests

Abstract

The article analyses popular discourse on piracy and power that emerged as a result of people's online anti-ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) engagement in Poland. Drawing upon a social semiotic visual analysis of 921 ACTA-related images shared online in 2012, the author analyzes a collective reconstruction of the concept of "piracy" and the popular narrative of the conflict in terms of its sides and subject. The study reveals how anti-ACTA images form a medium of national popular culture adaptation of global pop- and countercultural modalities. The protesters appropriated them to oppose another attempt at global