YouTube, copyright and power

Abstract

Building on Chapter 4's relational analysis of YouTube, this chapter explores the power effects swarming across YouTube when copyright is at risk. It advances three arguments. First, complex, fragile and contingent power effects, such as constituting governance objects and subjects, constructing people as audiences, commodifying people as consumers and normalising trade-offs between intellectual property and privacy rights, swarm across YouTube's copyright 'orderings'. The complexity of power is empirically unpacked by evaluating its diverse composition, aims, mechanics and effects. Attention is also drawn to changeable and fragile power relations through, for example, an exploration of resistance to power on the ground. Time and time again, the chapter delineates the contingencies of power at a micro-sociological level. From this viewpoint, power is not inevitable, inescapable or ineluctable: it is woven, untwisted, metamorphosed, contested and opposed in the here and now through diverse and changeable materially semiotic relations. Second, the chapter contends that hyperlinks, tick-boxes and other materials are crucial in rendering power more durable and mobile across time and space. Third, the chapter argues that there are convoluted and context-specific links between the 'legal complex' and power. Specifically, it explores the variable roles of law in copyright regulation as well as the links between law, legitimacy and territoriality.