I recently wrote about the controversy surrounding the removal of the Creative Commons license from the Ministry of Culture, the privatization of culture, and the importance of creating strategies to encourage dissent.
I decided to expand on it and make available a short essay—more a long post than an essay—written at the invitation of Eduardo Brandão and Cia de Foto for the catalog of the exhibition Histórias de Mapas, Piratas e Tesouros, in which I participated as an artist and speaker.
In this essay, following the path opened by André Gorz, I defend piracy as dissent from digital capitalism.
I briefly review images and conceptions of the subject/term in the press and conclude that there, in the so-called “traditional” or “mainstream media,” the term has become an umbrella concept.
It is used to designate remixing, terrorism, theft, bad faith, counterfeiting, and artistic creation.
I consider authors who have studied the subject rigorously from various perspectives: legal (Lessig), economic (Matt Mason), marketing (Semprini), and political (Gorz).
I analyze two specific cases: Amazon Noir, by cyberactivists Alessandro Ludovico, Paolo Cirio, and Ubermorgen, and a popular pirate cable network, TV Nova Baixada.
You can read the rest here