Pirate cosmopolitics and the transnational consciousness of the entertainment industry

As cultural texts, music and movies generate transnational publics united by shared identities and tastes. As objects of economic value, they fall under the juridical protection of global intellectual property institutions. These institutions aspire to produce their own version of a global citizen qua the responsible consumer. This paper argues that illegal copying and distribution have a capacity to forge new transnational affiliations. At the same time, they are subject ‘abjection’ by the apparatus of copyright enforcement. Focusing on the acts of semantic enclosure that such enforcement produces, the paper concludes that ‘policing’ has been increasingly mobilized as a path to becoming ‘global citizen’, thus reducing possibilities for the development of a critical, pluralistic subjectivity commonly termed ‘cosmopolitan’.