Peer to peer and the music industry: the criminalization of sharing

Description

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-sharingthe challenge to intellectual property lawposed by new technologies of communicationthe social psychology of cyber crimethe 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 p