Digital Piracy, Digital Practices: Changing Discourse on Young People and Downloading in Canadian Newspapers

Abstract

This paper examines how young people are constructed as media pirates in three Canadian newspapers during two publication periods, 1998–2000 and 2010–2012. These periods bookend copyright law modernization in the United States and Canada, represented by the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, and the Canadian Copyright Modernization Act, passed in 2012. Drawing on a corpus of articles from The Globe and Mail , The Toronto Star , and the Calgary Herald as primary texts, I use critical discourse analysis and media frame analysis to argue that the discursive construction in print media of the young person as pirate reveals public attitudes toward copyright law.