Legal Consciousness and Cultural Intimacy in Turkey’s Intellectual Property Reform

Abstract The Turkish state long enforced intellectual property (IP) rights only loosely. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, market liberalization and trade agreements drove an overhaul of the country’s copyright regime that transformed musical ownership and creativity, though music copyright stakeholders view this legal reform as ongoing. This article builds on existing accounts of legal consciousness to ethnographically document how a range of music industry actors—including legal professionals, musicians, music industry executives, and commercial users of copyrighted music—participate in IP reform. I identify a distinct set of cultural schemas that mediate such actors’ legal consciousness in this context. The internationally integrated nature of the copyright system, together with Turkey’s geopolitical positioning on the margins of Europe, has produced a reflexive aspect of legal consciousness in which Turkish citizens exhibit a heightened group status awareness as they compare their experience of domestic IP law to the imagined situation elsewhere. In a novel contribution to the literature, I observe how they often make sense of perceived dissonances between the ideals and practice of the law through culturally intimate narratives, taking the copyright system’s purported failures to typify something essential about what it means to be a citizen of Turkey.