Bajde.net

Taking a train back home from Vienna after an exciting week of teaching at Wirtschaft Universität in the morning and having Counter research meetings in the afternoon. Some interesting parallels. I was torturing my international students with gender issues in management in the morning while debating counterfeiting and piracy consumption in the afternoon. The common thread? “Leveling the playing field.” (I’m, borrowing Unicef’s definition of gender egalitarianism). This phrase has a dual purpose in my lecture on gender. It’s is a fairly simple outline of what egalitarianism is about, but it is also a nice example of how equality needs to be explored not only on the “in your face” level, but also on the more subtle plane. “Leveling the playing field”. It is rather ironic that a phrase used to promote gender equality is itself quite masculine in the sense of referring to life through the masculine metaphor of sport and competition. My message to the students? Equality is not simply a matter of equal opportunity to play “the game” (you can all play the game equally), it also a matter of the game being “male AND female friendly”. If the game is tailored to men to begin with than inviting women to play it on equal footing doesn’t really bring equality.

What does that mean for piracy? Unfortunately, there’s more than enough inequality to go around. A comprehensive study of piracy needs to consider the full range of inequalities related to copyright property and its violation, starting with political inequality (developed vs. developing countries), socio-economic inequality (rich vs. poor, corporation vs. individual), etc. It is quite clear who defines “the game” in this case. Drahos and Braithwaite go so far as speaking of “information feudalism”. We know who the lords are. What is more problematic is that we haven’t been successful in taking the game back. The IP-loaded (translation: companies who own a considerable amount of intellectual property) corporations persistently enforce their game by channeling our attention on how we play their game (do we follow the law and their rules as good players should) thereby clouding the questions related to the sensibility of the game itself. I’m not much of an anarchist. I’m all for games. But I would like for more of us to be concerned not with how to make the playing field level, but also with what games are worth playing when it comes to cultural products.