Peer to Peer and the Music Industry: The Criminalization of Sharing by Matthew David

English | Publisher: Sage Publishing, 2010 | 200 Pages | PDF | 1,5 MB
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, Matthew 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

The book concludes with a balanced, eye-opening assessment of alternative cultural modes of participation and their relationship to cultural capitalism.

This is a key 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 operate to monopolize markets, how international and state agencies defend property, while a global multitude undermine and/or reinvent both.