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.