Activity: Talk or presentation › Presentation at conference/workshop/seminar
Description
This paper considers some of the different academic and non-academic attempts to define piracy, arguing that piracy is best understood not as an act of criminal theft but rather as the result of a speech act that claims a property right in an extra-legal territory. Through the act of designating a rival claimant a pirate, rights to property are created in territories that are not yet part of legal regimes or that have yet to garner sufficient legal consideration. The continuous proliferation of types of piracy is thus the result of smooth spaces becoming striated, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial conceptualization, and is unlikely to ever cease, as new legal territories and claims to those territories appear, transform, and disappear.