The Good, the Bad, and the Commons: A Critical Review of Popular Discourse on Piracy and Power During Anti-ACTA Protests
Jakub Nowak · Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication · 2016
The article analyses popular discourse on piracy and power that emerged as a result of people's online anti-ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) engagement in Poland. Drawing upon a social semiotic visual analysis of 921 ACTA-related images shared online in 2012, the author analyzes a collective reconstruction of the concept of “piracy” and the popular narrative of the conflict in terms of its sides and subject. The study reveals how anti-ACTA images form a medium of national popular culture adaptation of global pop- and countercultural modalities. The protesters appropriated them to oppose another attempt at global copyright enforcement. New media became not only the tool and environment for these activities but were also collectively depicted as “the commons,” endangered by the agreement.