Recontextualizing copyright: Piracy, Hollywood, the state, and globalization

Cinema Journal

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 25-43

  Wang, Shujen ^a,b  

^a EMERSON COLLEGE   (United States)

^b Fairbank Center for East Asian Research   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36048950398     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: 15272087     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2003.0027     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. This literature includes Saskia Sassen, Losing Control?: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
2. Sassen, "Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization," Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 215-32
3. John Frow, "Public Domain and the New World Order in Knowledge," Social Semiotics 19, no. 2 (2000): 173-85
4. Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994)
5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)
6. Arjun Appadurai, "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination," Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 1-19
7. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996)
8. Castells, End of Millennium (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998)
9. and Simon Bromley, "The Space of Flows and Timeless Time: Manuel Castells's The Information Age," Radical Philosophy 97 (1999): 6-17
10. Lash and Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, 15
11. See "Freedom of Speech," The Economist, August 5, 2000, 29
12. See the WTO Web site: 〈www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/ agrm6_e.htm〉. When TRIPS took effect on January 1, 1995, it provided "transition arrangements" of one, five, or eleven years for its member countries to fall into line; developed countries were given one year to make sure that their IP laws conformed with the TRIPS agreement; developing countries and transition economies were given five years; and "least-developed" countries were given eleven years
13. James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). At the urging of the U.S. trade representative, the membership of GATT agreed to include IP protection on the Uruguay Round agenda. And as a result of the Uruguay Round negotiations, the WIPO and GATT joined forces. Such changes have contributed to the further reconfiguration of the state in this new global trade environment
14. Lash and Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, 112, 4
15. Castells, The Rise of the Network, 91
16. See also Bromley "The Space of Flows and Timeless Time," 6-17
17. This literature includes, for instance, on IP: National Research Council, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2000)
18. on laws: Robert P. Benko, Protecting Intellectual Property Rights: Issues and Controversies (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1987)
19. and Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens
20. on political economy: Ronald V. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996)
21. and Christopher May, "Capital, Knowledge, and Ownership: The 'Information Society' and Intellectual Property," Information, Communication, and Society 1, no. 3 (1998); 246-69
22. and on international information order: Frow, "Public Domain and the New World Order in Knowledge"
23. Michael P. Ryan, Knowledge Diplomacy: Global Competition and the Politics of Intellectual Property (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998)
24. and Krishna P. Jayakar, "The United States-China Copyright Dispute: A Two-Level Games Analysis," Communication Law and Policy 2, no. 1 (1997): 527-61
25. 17 U.S.C. § 102, 1994, cited in Jayakar, "The United States-China Copyright Dispute," 531
26. The IIPA is a "coalition of associations representing U.S. copyright-based industries in bilateral and multilateral efforts to open up foreign markets closed by piracy and other market access barriers." See 〈www.iipa.com/html/022398_press_release.html〉. IIPA member associations include the MPAA, the American Film Marketing Association (AFMA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), and the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA)
27. Stephen Siwek, "Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy: The 2002 Report," 〈www.iipa.com/pdf/2002_SIWEK_FULL.pdf〉
28. Furthermore, over the twenty-year period 1977-1997, in value added to GDP, the core copyright industries had a growth rate of 241 percent. Cited in 〈www.iipa.com/html/022398_press_release.html〉
29. See Ryan, Knowledge Diplomacy
30. and Bettig, Copyrighting Culture
31. Roger Smith also analyzes the profit records of the film industry in 2000. He points out the extremely high barriers to entry into the movie business, for example, that it has taken seven years for Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen to make DreamWorks into the first new major in fifty years (with $2.7 billion of "OPM" - Other People's Money). Smith, "Pic Profits Defy All the Prophets," Variety, January 1-7, 2001, 1, 48
32. Cathy Dunkley and Dana Harris, "Foreign Sales Mavens See Their Empires Fade," Variety, January 15-21, 2001, 1, 103
33. See Barry R. Litman, The Motion Picture Mega-Industry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998)
34. See the MPAA Web site: 〈http://www.mpaa.org〈
35. Cited in Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 69
36. Cited in Simon Bromley, "The House That Jack Built: How Valenti Brought Hollywood to the World," The Nation, April 3, 2000, 40
37. and Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
38. See Benko, Protecting Intellectual Property Rights
39. See, for example, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Telecommunications and the City (New York: Routledge, 1996)
40. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 469
41. Paul Virilio, "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition," in Verena Andermatt Conley ed., Rethinking Technologies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 10
42. See, for example, National Research Council, The Digital Dilemma
43. An example would be how badly MGM was crippled by the sale of the bulk of its library seventeen years ago. See Smith, "Pic Profits Defy All the Prophets," 1, 48
44. Ibid
45. See John Perry Barlow, "Censorship 2000," Nettime (listserv), July 12, 2000
46. In part three of his three-volume work on the network society, Manuel Castells has an extensive discussion on the operations of global criminal networks in the informational structure. Castells, End of Millennium, 166-205
47. See May "Capital, Knowledge, and Ownership," 246-69
48. See Mark D. Alleyne, International Power and International Communication (New York: St. Martin's, 1995). As cited in Alleyne (22), there are four functionalist outlooks: (1) all states have a harmony of interest that allows them to cooperate for mutual benefit; (2) political and technical matters can and should be separated in international relations; (3) there would be no recourse to war if economic and social welfare were achieved throughout international society; and (4) functional organizations would have a positive spillover influence on areas of international relations not yet covered by functional agencies
49. and Alleyne, International Power and International Communication
50. Initially, the Trade and Tariff Act of 1974 enabled the U.S. to take retaliatory action against any country that denied it rights granted by a trade agreement or that unfairly restricted U.S. commerce. The cooperation among the copyright industries and the resulting lobbying leverage HPA possessed led to the expansion and the change of language in the 1974 Trade Act. The Trade and Tariffs Act of 1984 extended the definition of unfair trade practices to include intellectual property rights violations. The 1984 Trade Act also empowered the U.S. trade representative to undertake annual reviews of problem countries, which could result in an investigation and subsequent trade sanctions. Under the same trade act, the U.S. president would also consider a country's IP protection record when deciding its eligibility for the generalized system of preferences (GSP), as well as whether a country's actions were "unjustifiable" or "unreasonable" according to Section 301. See Alleyne, International Power, 133
51. These include those with the "most onerous or egregious" policies that deny U.S. rights holders IP protection or market access. See Jayakar, "The United States-China Copyright Dispute," 534
52. "Copyright Piracy in 55 Countries Causes $10.8 Billion in Trade Losses in 1997," IIPA press release, February 23, 1998. See the IIPA Web site: 〈www.iipa.com/html/022398_press_release.html〉
53. Frow, "Public Domain and the New World Order in Knowledge," 178
54. Sassen, Losing Control? Sassen has pointed out that even in the U.S. many people who had supported GATT did not like the idea of the WTO because it would result in the nation being bound to an international dispute-resolution tribunal that the U.S. did not entirely control
55. Sassen, "Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global," 225
56. Sassen, Losing Control? 5
57. Bromley, "The Space of Flows and Timeless Time," 16
58. Sassen sees the "informal economy" as resulting from regulatory fractures and spatiotemporal disorders. Piracy, albeit not part of the "informal economy" that Sassen has discussed, can also be examined along similar trajectories of reasoning. Sassen, "Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global," 221
59. See, for example, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990)
60. Sassen, "Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global," 217
61. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
62. Appadurai, "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination," 5