Joe Karaganis (ed.): Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (2011) [EN, RU, ES, CN]

“Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia.

Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

“The choice,” said Joe Karaganis, director of the project, “isn’t between high piracy and low piracy in most media markets. The choice, rather, is between high-piracy, high-price markets and high-piracy, low price markets. Our work shows that media businesses can survive in both environments, and that developing countries have a strong interest in promoting the latter. This problem has little to do with enforcement and a lot to do with fostering competition.””

Publisher The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 2011
Distributed under a Consumer’s Dilemma license
ISBN 978-0-98412574-6
440 pages

PDF (English, added on 2018-5-11)
PDFs (4 languages, from publisher; updated 2015-5-14)

See also Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education, 2018.

Sherry Turkle: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

“Consider Facebook—it’s human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It’s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today’s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.”

Publisher Basic Books, 2011
ISBN 0465010210, 9780465010219
384 pages

publisher

PDF (added on 2012-11-4)

Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders 1-2 (2010)

Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders #2

When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural.

Editors: Kernow Craig, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Soenke Zehle
December 2010
48 pages
Creative Commons License

Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders #1

Transit-labour investigates changing patterns of labour and mobility in the whirlwind of Asian capitalist transformation. Mindful of the view of Asia as the world’s factory, this three year research project examines the role of creativity, invention and knowledge production in the new economic order being forged from the region’s capitalist centres. Particular attention is given to changing relations of culture and economy in this transition and their entanglement with the production of new subjectivities and modalities of labour.

Editors: Kernow Craig, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter
July 2010
20 pages
Creative Commons License

authors

Direct download, Volume 2
Direct download, Volume 1