ABSTRACT
This chapter examines piracy as a means of creative production in the context of Chilean community media. In January 2018, after two decades of operating outside of a legal framework, Chile’s first community television station received a license to transmit under the country’s new digital television law. Station members received this news with excitement, but also trepidation. Like their national television counterparts, this small station understood production as not only an act of creating their own content but also a way of finding and disseminating interesting content from other producers. This station had become integral to the community through their reporting on neighborhood events, along with their use of one cable subscription to transmit selected programming to the entire low-income neighborhood. The transition from informal to formal and analog to digital, Ashley shows, would also likely mean a change in the station’s logic of production and, subsequently, a greater adherence to intellectual property (IP) laws. Analyzing station members’ reticence to give up some of their creative license, Ashley argues for a theory of cultural production that considers a shift in context as a component of content creation.
