Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America Rethinking Creativity and the Common Good

Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America is the first sustained effort to present an alternative framework for understanding piracy and contemporary challenges to global discourses on intellectual property (IP) in the Americas.

While piracy might just look like theft and derivative reproduction from the perspective of many right-holders, the contributors to this volume go beyond this economic-driven logic and show how practices of copying are in fact practices of reinvention that reflect the rich social networks and forms of creativity, authorship, commerce, and consumption that characterize informal economies. From a perspective informed by contemporary scenarios in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, and the United States, they engage in a discussion of alternatives that?predicated on the importance of protecting culture?allow for other ways of conceiving prosperity at local, national, regional, and global levels. Examples discussed include video games, clothing, trinkets, music, film, TV, and books.

Designed to help understand the broader implications of IP and piracy for the field of Latin American studies, this book will be a major contribution to Global South studies, as well as to the growing bibliography on globalization, informal markets, and piracy.

Introduction 1. How Trinkets Became Counterfeits: Value and Intellectual Property in a Low-income Market in Brazil 2. The Piracy Problem: Indigeneity, Hybridity, and the Racial Politics of IP Enforcement in Guatemala 3. Piracy and/as Legitimate Business 4. Piracy as Media Practice: The Informal Market of Music and Videos in Peru 5. Context as Content in Chilean Community Media 6. ‘Feeling Pirate’ as Media Affect in Mexican-American Experience 7. From Piracy as a Crime to Piracy as a Necessity: Territorial Inequalities and the Socially Necessary Market in Brazil 8. Book Piracy in Chile and the Proletarianization of Literature in Pedro Lemebel 9. Pirate Book Aesthetics in Contemporary Argentina 10. Between Abundance and Appropriation: Indeterminate Critiques of Global IP Schemes 11. The Creative Copy: Agency and Fashion at a Market for Counterfeited Garments Appendix: A Primer on Intellectual Property

Víctor Goldgel-Carballo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Juan Poblete is Professor of Latin/o American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz.