Have the music and movie industries lost the battle to criminalize downloading?
This penetrating and informative book provides readers with the perfect systematic critical guide to the file-sharing phenomenon. Combining inter-disciplinary resources from sociology, history, media and communication studies and cultural studies, David unpacks the economics, psychology and philosophy of file-sharing.
The book carefully situates the reader in a field of relevant approaches including network society theory, post-structuralism and ethnographic research. It uses this to launch into a fascinating enquiry into:
- the rise of file-sharing
- the challenge to intellectual property law posed by new technologies of communication
- the social psychology of cyber crime
- the response of the mass media and multi-national corporations.
Matthew David concludes with a balanced, eye-opening assessment of alternative cultural modes of participation and their relationship to cultural capitalism.
This is a landmark work in the sociology of popular culture and cultural criminology. It fuses a deep knowledge of the music industry and the new technologies of mass communication with a powerful perspective on how multinational corporations seek to monopolize markets, how international and state agencies defend property, while a global multitude undermine and/or reinvent both.
Inhoudsopgave
Introduction
The Global Network Society: Territorialization and Deterritorialization
File-Sharing: A Brief History
Markets and Monopolies in Informational Goods: Intellectual Property Rights and Protectionism
Legal Genealogies
Technical Mythologies and Security Risks
Media Management
Creativity as Performance: The Myth of Creative Capital
Alternative Cultural Models of Participation, Communication and Reward?
Conclusions
Over de auteur
Matthew David is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Science at Durham University, and has undertaken research in the areas of new social movements, online data-services in higher education, online training in rural areas and forms of free online music sharing. He is author of Science in Society (Palgrave 2005) and Peer to Peer and the Music Industry (SAGE 2010), and co-author of Social Research (SAGE, latest edition 2011).