Intellectual Property, Piracy, and Counterfeiting

TLDR: The authors argue that the elastic space between intellectual property and unauthorized use (including piracy and counterfeiting) is an increasingly important feature of contemporary textual production and circulation, and that the dynamic relationship between IP and piracy/counterfeiting appears as a means of organizing sense-perception and subjectivity, parsing geopolitical space, handling the surfeits and deficits that emerge in contemporary text circulation, distinguishing formality from informality, and deciding levels and forms of acceptable participation in the production and consumption of commodities.

Abstract: This review argues that the elastic space between intellectual property (IP) and unauthorized use (including piracy and counterfeiting) is an increasingly important feature of contemporary textual production and circulation. Within the context of digital textuality, circulatory legitimacy becomes integral to both contextualization and entextualization. The dynamic relationship between IP and piracy/counterfeiting appears as a means of organizing sense-perception and subjectivity, parsing geopolitical space, handling the surfeits and deficits that emerge in contemporary text circulation, distinguishing formality from informality, and deciding levels and forms of acceptable participation in the production and consumption of commodities. This becomes particularly fraught in the face of anxieties about the potential limitlessness of circulation.