ABSTRACT
Naomi Mezey (2003), Professor of Law at Georgetown University, defines law as an inherently cultural phenomenon: ‘Law is simply one of the signifying practices that constitute culture, and, despite its best efforts, it cannot be divorced from culture. Nor, for that matter, can culture be divorced from law’ (p. 45). Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of copyright whose most fundamental function has always been to define the roles of and relations between actors on the cultural field. Since the late 1990s, copyright has also become the object of a widespread and long-lasting political and cultural discussion. This is indeed not the first time that copyright is publicly contested – historians have shown that intellectual property rights (IPR) and piracy have been under debate many times in the past (cf. Rose 1993, Feather 1994,
Vaidyanathan 2001, Saint-Amour 2003, Johns 2009, Wilf 2011). It might, however, be fair to say that the criticism against the expansion of IPR has a greater global impact than ever before, mobilizing a wide range of groups, from young Western netizens concerned that laws like Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will kill freedom and creativity on the Internet, to human rights groups in the Third World that point to the social costs of drug patents and Western exploitation on indigenous knowledge (cf. Halbert 2005, Gillespie 2007, Haunss 2011).
