Copyright by Kathryn Ann Metz 2010 - The University of Texas at ...

independently. Ana María Ochoa, for instance, discusses musical piracy within communities
on the peripheries of modern nation states in Latin America. Ochoa focuses on the dual
notions of piracy as illegitimate or illegal practice versus piracy as a legitimate means of
accessing culture on the part of those largely deprived access to the mainstream market.
Piracy, she asserts,
“has to be understood in the context of a drastic change in modes of
communication in music provided by new technology that will probably alter
the structure of the music industry as we knew it in the twentieth century,
but also in the context of a cultural economic order where legal and paralegal
practices of the music industry are at play in an increasingly tense and critical
way” (Ochoa 2002).
Effectively, Ochoa defends the practice, considering it part of creative and necessary
strategies on the part of communities whose “standard” interactions with capitalist structures
are made impossible.
Piracy constitutes an omnipresent part of global capitalism. As Brian Larkin
discusses in his ethnography, “media piracy is part of the „organizational architecture‟ of
globalization, providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate” (Larkin
2004: 289). Larkin describes piracy as a provisional system within the larger framework of
capitalism that underscores the breakdown within it (Larkin 2004: 291). In his view, “pirate
infrastructure is a powerful mediating force that produces new modes of organizing sensory
perception, time, space, and economic networks” (Larkin 2004: 291). Chapter 5 explores
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