The broad field of 20th-century media theory debate is hardly something which lends itself to succinct summarizing. One striking fact, however, especially in the context of a reader on the subject of piracy, is that “reproducibility” is a recurring theme. What is seen as a distinguishing feature of technical media (since the emergence of photography and film, and in particular of the new media) is that the content they store can easily be reproduced. And what is more, their content is designed to be reproducible; it seems as though the very difference between original and copy is becoming obsolete. This has been described by various theorists with varying emphasis as a specific feature and an objective of media development: Part 1 of this text will briefly present a few relevant positions. The mere existence, however, of terms such as “piracy” (cf. Yar 2005) or “pirated copy,” and of campaigns against “copyright pirates,” shows that reproducibility is not a phenomenon which is welcomed unreservedly. Reproducibility clashes with the economic imperative of scarcity, and sometimes with legal regulations. Thus judicial, technical, and didactic procedures work together to prevent unauthorized reproduction – this is outlined briefly in Part 2. Part 3 offers a short conclusion.

I

The obvious association evoked by the term “reproducibility” is Walter Benjamin's well-known text “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction,” first published in French in 1936. It should be noted that Benjamin, thinking to diagnose a whole epoch, describes an “age of technological reproducibility” (as the better translation would be), one which, however, initially refers mainly to the work of art. He does stress that the work of art has always been manually reproducible, but: “Technological reproduction of the work of art is something else, something that has been practiced intermittently through history, at widely separated intervals though with growing intensity” (Benjamin 2008, 3). Thus it seems that reproducibility has at least intensified in the modern period.

According to Benjamin, the result of this intensification is firstly “the most profound changes” in the impact of “traditional artworks” (Benjamin 2008, 5). Reproduction detaches the artwork from tradition and makes it “come closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in” (Benjamin 2008, 7); the exhibition value supplants the cult value.