Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the kind of policing which emerges as police officers are being put into a position of establishing and protecting, through a modus of private public partnerships, property relations and the extraction of value from a commodity which actually pushes towards being freely available and therefore ultimately withstands the possibility of being policed.

Paper long abstract:

Efforts around the so-called second enclosure are rife. We are witnessing the technological advancements that make the unprecedented circulation of ideas, knowledge and information possible; and we are confronted with an economy shifting from traditional sources of the production of wealth to new forms of value deriving from 'immaterial labour.' These developments are accompanied and underwritten by accelerated proliferation of technologies of law enforcement, which aim at defining, protecting and policing intellectual property. CD and DVD piracy is one of the ubiquitous but highly contested forms in terms of property relations and value in which these developments have inserted itself into everyday life in South Africa, be it the everyday life of trading, consuming or policing. Based on an ethnography of the commercial crime unit in Johannesburg, the papers looks at how the (morally) contested nature of DVD piracy makes the policing of it an impossible but nevertheless productive undertaking. It shows how policing fails to beat the illicit trade, and how this leads to a breakdown of the meaning of policing, but yet produces alternative moral economies and manages to extract from it a different kind of value which is used to refashion policing and its powers.