This book takes the concept of piracy as a starting point to discuss the instability of property as a social construction and how this is spatially situated. Piracy is understood as acts and practices that emerge in zones where the construction and definition of property is ambiguous. Media piracy is a frequently used example where file-sharers and copyright holders argue whether culture and information is a common resource to be freely shared or property to be protected. This book highlights that this is not a dilemma unique to immaterial resources: concepts such as property, ownership and the rights of use are just as diffuse when it comes to spatial resources such as land, water, air or urban space. By structuring the book around this heterogeneous understanding of piracy as an analytical perspective, the editors and contributors advance a trans-disciplinary and multi-theoretical approach to place and property. In doing so, the book moves from theoretical discussions on commons and property to empirical cases concerning access to and appropriation of land, natural and cultural resources. The chapters cover areas such as maritime piracy, the philosophical and legal foundations of property rights, mining and land rights, biopiracy and traditional knowledge, indigenous rights, colonization of space, military expansionism and the enclosure of urban space. This book is essential reading for a variety of disciplines including indigenous studies, cultural studies, geography, political economy, law, environmental studies and all readers concerned with piracy and the ambiguity of property.

Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood. Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

In this original study of intellectual property rights (IPR) in relation to state capacity, Dimitrov analyzes this puzzle by offering the first systematic analysis of all IPR enforcement avenues in China, across all IPR subtypes. He shows that the extremely high volume of enforcement provided for copyrights and trademarks is unfortunately of a low quality, and as such serves only to perpetuate IPR violations. In the area of patents, however, he finds a low volume of high-quality enforcement. In light of these findings, the book develops a theory of state capacity that conceptualizes the Chinese state as simultaneously weak and strong. The book draws on extensive fieldwork in China and five other countries, as well as on 10 unique IPR enforcement datasets that exploit previously unexplored sources, including case files of private investigation firms.

This book takes a Marxist approach to the study of media piracy – the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts in violation of intellectual property laws – to examine its place as an endemic feature of the cultural economy since the rise of the Internet. The author explores media piracy not in terms of its moral or legal failings, or as the inevitable by-product of digital technologies, but as a symptom of a much larger restructuring of cultural labor in the era of the Internet: labor that is digital, entrepreneurial, informal, and even illegal, and increasingly politicized. Sketching the contours of this new political economy while engaging with theories of digital media, both critical and celebratory, Mueller reveals piracy as a submerged social history of the digital world, and potentially the key to its political reimagining. This significant contribution to the study of piracy and digital culture will be vital reading for scholars and students of critical media studies, cultural studies, political theory, or digital humanities, and particularly those researching media piracy, digital labor, the digital economy, and Marxist theory.

Digital piracy. It's a global war -- and it's just begun. Pirates of the Digital Millennium chronicles that war. All of it: media conglomerates vs. teenagers, tech companies vs. content providers, artists battling artists, nations vs. nations, law enforcement vs. organized crime. John Gantz and Jack Rochester cover every side and all the implications. Economics. Law. Ethics. Culture. The players. And above all, the realities -- including the exclusive new findings of a 57-country digital piracy research project. The media universe is shaking to its very foundations. This book helps you make sense of what's happening -- and what's next.

This book provides a look at the various nuances of the commercial aspects of space transport and offers a workable and practical legal and regulatory approach to be taken by the International Civil Aviation Organization. The book also addresses the perceived lack of wisdom in neglecting to consider the basic legal structure of a regulatory regime for commercial space transport as a first step and goes on to analyze ways and means of using the existing legal instruments pertaining to international civil aviation as an analogous system that can be moulded into a separate and cohesive set of multilateral legal instruments that could apply to commercial space transport. As expected, commercial space transport has taken off with a flourish. It is now evident that, from sub-orbital flights to mining asteroids, this industry will grow exponentially. Signs of its importance are reflected by various international conferences being convened on the subject both by academia and the international community. The only snag is the lack of a regulatory instrument or in the least a contrived approach to a definitive legal regime that would provide a structure, purpose and direction to commercial space transport. This blatant lacuna and neglect has resulted in the emergence of various theories by academics and a half hearted look at the subject by the international legal community.

This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Somali pirates operating off the Horn of Africa have attacked more than 450 ships and taken nearly 2,400 hostages since 2007. A small number of U.S.-flagged vessels and ships have been among those affected. As Somalia lacks a functioning government and is unable to repress piracy in its waters, the National Security Council developed an interagency Action Plan in December 2008 to prevent, disrupt, and prosecute piracy off the Horn of Africa in collaboration with international and industry partners. This report evaluated the extent to which U.S. agencies: (1) have implemented the plan, and any challenges they face in doing so; and (2) have collaborated with partners in counter-piracy efforts. Includes recommendations. Charts and tables.