Re-thinking Copyright Through the Copy in Russia

Abstract

How one copy of a film or a single is made illegal, while its identical twin is treated as legitimate? By drawing from the material collected in Russia on the illegal copying and distribution of video and musical contents, this paper moves beyond the definition of media piracy in legal terms, and instead examines practices of copying, the properties of copies, and the motivations that drive their circulation, color laws and their continuous application. It approaches the copy not as an isolated, individual unit but part of an assemblage, and demonstrates the existence of a specific culture of circulation which brings together its diverse components as one ‘catchment’. In Russia, the legal and pirate media markets do not stand in opposition to one another but co-exist and even enable each other. Media goods have social value that extends beyond commercial, and which is strongly associated with the cultural reproduction of audiences who are cosmopolitan in character and partake in the transnational circuits of culture. Finally, the very definition of what is ‘legal’ in Russian is an outcome of the unstable process of authentication in which experts test, guess and create material trails of evidence to stabilize elusive digital substances. On the basis of these findings, the paper problematizes the social imaginary around the digital copy and with it, the widely circulating notion of ‘piracy’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No scholarly work is the work of a lone mind. This paper is no exception. The empirical stage of the project was conducted in collaboration with Oleg Pachenkov and Irina Olimpieva, the Center for Independent Social Research (St. Petersburg) and Anatoly Kozyrev (the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology). Close work with Joe Karaganis (SSRC and American Assembly) on Media Piracy in Emerging Economies served as a starting point and an inspiration for this article. I greatly benefited from the discussion of an earlier version of the paper at the Cultures of Circulation workshop organized by Melissa Aronczyck and Ailsa Craig, together with other members of the NYLON research network.

Notes

1. An important distinction that was made in the editorial of the inaugural issue of this journal between the cultural economy and cultural economic analysis (Bennett et al. 2008)

2. As in the case of the electronic multinational NEC (Johns 2009).

3. Interview recorded July 2008, St. Petersburg

4. Russian Antitrust Service Newsletter, October 2006.

5. Visit and interaction recorded in June 2008, St. Petersburg.