[Commlist] New book: Digital Pirates

We would like to announce a new publication from Stanford University 
Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*Digital Pirates***

Policing Intellectual Property in Brazil

*Alexander Sebastian Dent***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781503612976/digital-pirates/_*

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online:*

*CSLS2020*

“Smart, sly, and generatively disconcerting, /Digital Pirates/is an 
ethnographically textured and theoretically rambunctious charting of 
emerging mediascapes. Dent provides a complex and challenging account of 
contemporary Brazil and a principled exploration of the unpredictable 
resonances at the contested confluence of media, technology, regulatory 
regimes, and creativity. And he does so with piratical panache.”*—Donald 
L. Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz *

“/Digital Pirates /is an insightful and often beautiful exploration of 
digitization as a dissolving agent for older cultural forms, a catalyst 
for new ones, and a context for reconsolidating the boundaries that 
define markets, institutions, laws, and publics. Alex Dent moves fluidly 
between theoretical and empirical registers to weave a rich account of 
lived experience in Brazil that illuminates global cultural 
change.”*—Joe Karaganis, Columbia University*

/Digital Pirates/examines the unauthorized creation, distribution, and 
consumption of movies and music in Brazil. Alexander Sebastian Dent 
offers a new definition of piracy as indispensable to current capitalism 
alongside increasing global enforcement of intellectual property (IP). 
Complex and capricious laws might prohibit it, but piracy remains a core 
activity of the twenty-first century.

Combining the tools of linguistic and cultural anthropology with models 
from media studies and political economy, /Digital Pirates/reveals how 
the dynamics of IP and piracy serve as strategies for managing the gaps 
between texts—in this case, digital content. Dent’s analysis includes 
his fieldwork in and around São Paulo with pirates, musicians, 
filmmakers, police, salesmen, technicians, policymakers, politicians, 
activists, and consumers. Rather than argue for rigid positions, he 
suggests that Brazilians are pulled in multiple directions according to 
the injunctions of international governance, localized pleasure, magical 
consumption, and economic efficiency. Through its novel theorization of 
“digital textuality,” this book offers crucial insights into the 
qualities of today’s mediascape as well as the particularized political 
and cultural norms that govern it. The book also shows how twenty-first 
century capitalism generates piracy and its enforcement simultaneously, 
while producing fraught consumer experiences in Latin America and beyond.

*Alexander Sebastian Dent*is Associate Professor of Anthropology & 
International Affairs at George Washington University.



*Stanford University Press**| July 2020 | 208pp | 9781503612976 | PB | 
£20.99**

*Price subject to change.

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