Peer to Peer and the Music Industry: The Criminalization of Sharing (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

By: Matthew David

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Synopsis: 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 * and the response of the mass media and multi-national corporations. The book 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.