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particular with the refinement of microelectronic digital techniques. This has
widened the sphere of criminal transgression of copyright law, but the Internet has
also fed a growing ‘open source’ movement, striving to transform commodity
economies into networks of collective sharing and mutual gifts. For instance, back in
1998, a 26-year-old man was convicted in Solna for having sold 371 illegally copied
Sony PlayStation games. In between these two poles are the many individuals who
just make use of the opportunities offered by new media machines, with no par-
ticular economic or ideological motives. To this development, corporations have
responded with lawsuits and scaremongering. Anti-piracy departments of the trade
associations for computer games, video films and music organize campaigns to hunt
down pirates and restrict their field of action, but big proportions of the population
– the young in particular – find it morally justifible to copy these kinds of media texts
for private use or for sharing with friends. Besides copying practices, there are also
globalized networks of online ‘hacktivists’ who break corporate codes and place crit-
ical counter-messages on their websites. 34
These struggles involve tensions between different groups in civil society as well,
as witnessed by individual music and film artists’ efforts to defend their works from
piracy, in order to secure their personal incomes. Front lines of power struggle do not
just concern the two societal systems, but can as well criss-cross the lifeworlds of
everyday activities and identities. It must further be mentioned that social move-
ments do not only lean on the state to defend the lifeworld against deficiencies of the
market. It may also be the other way around. Especially in totalitarian states like the
People’s Republic of China, or some Eastern European countries, protest movements
make regular use of free market resources to undermine censorship and other forms
of authoritarian media control. But with the neo-liberal trend towards deregulation
and privatization in most countries, during the last couple of decades it has been the
commercial sector’s constraints that have been the focus of critical practice and
debate.
The various alternative media movements raise many important questions for the
politics of media consumption. The piracy and copyright wars have legal, technical
and economic as well as ideological dimensions. They question the role and function
of commodity exchange, copyright, private ownership, freedom of expression and the
relationship between producer and work in late capitalism.

COMMUNICATIVE RIGHTS, CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP
The media are consumed, but they are also consuming – of time, space and resources.
People need all these resources in order to use media, and media use has its costs. This
doubleness is implied in the title of this book: ‘Consuming Media’. The chapter on
media hardware argued that many communicating machines are today necessary
tools for citizens to implement their rights of participation and communication in
complex, late-modern societies. This is confirmed by certain state regulations, though
there is no consensus about precisely which media belong to the basic necessities of
life, or which forms of provision should exist for them. These basic issues on the