NCJ Number
218888
Date Published
2007
Length
14 pages
Annotation
With the piracy evolving as one of the most high-profile Internet crime issues in recent years, this chapter explores the controversy around online sharing of popular cultural goods, especially musical recordings.
Abstract
This chapter attempts to show how such endeavors have not been successful in constructing piracy as a crime problem. However, these endeavors have been met with strategies of resistance that refuse and contest this process of labeling, turning claims about theft and immorality back upon the entrepreneurs themselves. Far from being self-evidently criminal or deviant, the problematic nature of online copying has of necessity required an elaborate rhetorical construction by those moral entrepreneurs who stand to benefit from the enforcement of copyrights. The piracy controversy offers a fine example of how those groups and individuals targeted with deviant labels seek to challenge the definitions favored by the powerful, and to defend their cultural practices as legitimate and socially valuable. While piracy campaigns have resulted in returns in the form of legal and crime control innovations, it is by no means certain that they will ultimately succeed in creating a villain in cultural copying on the Internet. When it comes to Internet crime issues, it can fairly be suggested that the problem of online piracy has been one of the two most hotly debated topics, not far from the public’s eye of concern. In the case of music piracy, the ways in which organized economic interests (the recording industry and its allies) have attempted to create a new moral consensus about music downloading as a form of harmful criminal activity and those people who engage in it as parasites and thieves. References