Authors, Users and Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity

Abstract

In current debates over copyright law, the author, the user, and the pirate are almost always invoked. Some in the creative industries call for more legal protection for the authors; activists and academics promote user rights and user-generated content; and online pirates openly challenge the strict enforcement of copyright law. James Meese offers a new way to think about these three central subjects of copyright law, proposing a relational framework that encompasses all three. Meese views authors, users and pirates as interconnected subjects, analyzing them as a relational triad. He argues that addressing the relationships among the three subjects will shed light on how the key conceptual underpinnings of copyright law are justified in practice. His work rests on the comparative analysis of the legal situation in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Keywords

• author
• user
• pirate
• copyright
• relational subjectivity