The Other of Authorship: Feminism, Piracy, and the Moral Economy of Copyright in Partners in Crime: A Love Story

Abstract

The copyright regime has always been responsible for protecting and sustaining authorship, which validates the autonomous and legal identity of the ‘source’. Although the history of copyright includes several discussions of inclusivity, its assumed objectivity and neutrality have resulted in the exclusion of marginalised groups within the art world and of artists outside the dominant, mainstream machinery. This otherised perspective on copyright discourse has always positioned women and art as points of negotiation within the dominant discourse on intellectual property rights. This is not only to highlight the exclusion of women from intellectual property law, which is conceded and at the same time recognisable, but also to rethink other possibilities for conceptualising art and its sustainability through a feminist intervention. In thinking about art, law, and feminism, this paper moves beyond the simplistic binary between copyright and copyleft. It offers an intermediate possibility in which the 'love' for piracy dwells. This study explores how this 'love' for piracy resists and subverts the capitalist, corporate-owned definition of art through the documentary film Partners in Crime: A Love Story (2011) by the Indian Filmmaker Paromita Vohra. This paper aims to examine the space between the moralities of (copy) correct and (copy)left and to negotiate with the Other (of authorship and ownership), lensed through Feminism, with reference to the aforementioned film.