Who are the pirates? Power relationships in a globalized music market, ethnomusicological perspectives

This dissertation provides an analysis of the phenomenon of music piracy during the age of consumer digital audio technology, or roughly 1998-2004. The main focus falls on the socio-economic factors surrounding the proliferation of "commercial piracy," the making and selling of pirated CDs, and to a lesser extent, so-called "Internet piracy," or the trading of electronically encoded music files via the Internet. This study considers CD piracy as part of the underground, or informal economies of the world, which serve very real social needs for a majority of the population that, due to economic reasons, has no access to the formal markets. Close attention is paid to the concerted efforts by the recording industry and other protective agencies to eradicate piracy on a global level. The war on piracy has resulted in complex power relationships between industrialized nations like the United States, the European Community, Japan and developing and least-developed nations. Since the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Trade Related Intellectual Properties (TRIPs) Agreement in 1995, protecting the intellectual properties of the industrialized world became linked to trade policies. TRIPs meant that economic sanctions and trade restrictions could be used to retaliate against non-complying nations. In the pursuit of a piracy-free world, the recording industry has used an iron fist with non-compliant nations of the WTO. Through a special ethnographic case study of Brazil, the complex international relationships and the effects of the TRIPs Agreement on local culture are analyzed focusing on the impact of the global "war on piracy" on the creators, protectors, purveyors and consumers of music. Numerous interviews and conversations conducted in Brazil, and to a lesser extent, the U.S., with musicians, attorneys, pirates, consumers, educators, and journalists add "living" data to the vast archival resources.