[NYCInfoLaw] Two Info Law Things

[Joshua L. Simmons]

For those interested in privacy, there is a symposium at NYU on Friday
you might enjoy.  Also, on Thursday, the Intellectual Property and its
Discontents series brings you "Branding the Mahatma" at 12:15 in the
East Campus Residential Center of Columbia University.  Visit our
calendar for more information: http://www.nycinfolaw.org/calendar.php.


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SAVE THE DATE:  A Symposium on Piracy and Property
sponsored by the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
WHEN:  Friday, April 10, 2009 from 10-5pm (SCHEDULE TO FOLLOW)
WHERE: SCA Gallery Space, 41 E. 11th Street, Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis, 7th Floor

KEYNOTE to be delivered by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Associate Professor of
Media Studies and Law, University of Virginia

FOR MORE INFORMATION: please email nyupiracysymposium at gmail.com.

This symposium will interrogate contemporary designations and
applications of the term ³piracy.²  While piracy popularly invokes an
image of a rogue captain trolling the high seas, the United Nations
defines the term more broadly as a "crime committed on the high seas
or in any other place outside the jurisdiction of any state, committed
for private ends."  Current guises of  piracy ­  including Gnutella's
unstoppable and diffuse networks; cheap Canadian pharmaceuticals
illegally carried across borders; Louis Vuitton knockoffs sold in
Canal Street doorways;  and the case of The Golden Venture, which
wrecked on Rockaway Peninsula while transporting undocumented
Fujianese workers to New York City ­ suggest the expansive scope of
the crime and the variety people who can be or become pirates.

While contemporary uses of the term have expanded well beyond the
maritime, piracy's association with rebellion and a dangerous
capitalism external to states and laws remains.
Yet is piracy an anathema to the state or rather a crucial site for
the complex interplay between state discipline and market expansion?
This symposium proposes the critical historicization of piracy and
seeks to track the legal, cultural and economic shifts that accompany
designations of piracy.  By foregrounding piracy as a legal creation,
we hope to allow a more complicated conception of piracy to emerge‹one
which reveals how networks of sovereignty, theft, security and trade
impact the the perceived legitimacy of persons, property and
jurisdictional claims. We encourage discussion of how racial, gender
and sexual projects, among others, are developed and sustained through
such maneuvers.

Addressing the Tricontinental in Havana in 1966, Amilcar Cabral called
the entire (neo)colonial extraction "of the human and natural
resources of our peoples" "piracy reorganized."  For Cabral, property
is piracy.  Following his lead, the symposium will consider as piracy
not merely the illegal circulation of commodities, but also the
processes of enclosure which render people and the things they produce
in common as property to be bought, sold, and regulated by the state.

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