Copyright or Copywrong : A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Swedish Debate on Copyright and Piracy

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the view on copyright emerges in the media debate, and the overall research question is what possible explanations there might be for the view being different depending on whom the writer is and whom s/he represents. The theoretical framework is Fairclough's critical discourse analysis and the method used is the analytic model in three stages that he presents in his book Language and Power (2001). The empirical material was selected through an initial search in Media Retriever, followed by a manual se-lection process, which resulted in a final selection of eight articles, all published in Swedish daily newspapers between the years 2006 and 2014. In the analysis, two main discourses were identified – the producer discourse and the consumer discourse – in which all the texts could be placed. The producer discourse puts the interests of the author first, and holds the view that copyright law must be strong to protect the authors' rights. The consumer discourse on the other hand puts the interest of the consumer first, and their view is that the public has the right to access the world's collect-ed knowledge and culture. This paper also examines the members' resources that authors bring to the texts in the form of common sense, and also in the form of a motive for entering in the debate. Furthermore, this paper also looks at the fact that power relations between the participants in the texts are complicated as they form a com-plex web of formal and informal power relations. The conclusion is that the main explanation for the different ways of viewing copyright is the two afore-mentioned discourses, and that the members' resources the authors bring to the texts are very ideological. The ideological arguments and the complex power relations result in very rigid positions in the debate. This is a two years master's thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies