Peers Pirates And Persuasion

John Logie examines the rhetoric of the ongoing debate over peer-to-peer technologies, in particular Napster and its successors. The Grokster case, he contends, has already produced the chilling effects that will stifle the innovative spirit at the heart of the Internet and networked communities.

An examination of subjectivity in copyright law, analyzing authors, users, and pirates through a relational framework. In current debates over copyright law, the author, the user, and the pirate are almost always invoked. Some in the creative industries call for more legal protection for authors; activists and academics promote user rights and user-generated content; and online pirates openly challenge the strict enforcement of copyright law. In this book, James Meese offers a new way to think about these three central subjects of copyright law, proposing a relational framework that encompasses all three. Meese views authors, users, and pirates as interconnected subjects, analyzing them as a relational triad. He argues that addressing the relationships among the three subjects will shed light on how the key conceptual underpinnings of copyright law are justified in practice. Meese presents a series of historical and contemporary examples, from nineteenth-century cases of book abridgement to recent controversies over the reuse of Instagram photos. He not only considers the author, user, and pirate in terms of copyright law, but also explores the experiential element of subjectivity—how people understand and construct their own subjectivity in relation to these three subject positions. Meese maps the emergence of the author, user, and pirate over the first two centuries of copyright's existence; describes how regulation and technological limitations turned people from creators to consumers; considers relational authorship; explores practices in sampling, music licensing, and contemporary art; examines provisions in copyright law for user-generated content; and reimagines the pirate as an innovator.

Digital piracy cultures and peer-to-peer technologies combined to spark transformations in audio-visual distribution between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Digital piracy also inspired the creation of a global anti-piracy law and policy regime, and counter-movements such as the Swedish and German Pirate Parties. These trends provide starting points for a wide-ranging debate about the prospects for deep and lasting changes in social life enabled by piratical technology practices. This edited volume brings together contemporary scholarship in communication and media studies, addressing piracy as a recombinant feature of popular communication, technological innovation, and communication law and policy. An international collection of contributors highlights key debates about piracy, popular communication, and social change, and provides a lasting resource for global media studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Communication.

This Handbook brings together scholars from around the world in addressing the global significance of, controversies over and alternatives to intellectual property (IP) today. It brings together over fifty of the leading authors in this field across the spectrum of academic disciplines, from law, economics, geography, sociology, politics and anthropology. This volume addresses the full spectrum of IP issues including copyright, patent, trademarks and trade secrets, as well as parallel rights and novel applications. In addition to addressing the role of IP in an increasingly information based and globalized economy and culture, it also challenges the utility and viability of IP today and addresses a range of alternative futures.

Non-Commercial digital piracy has seen an unprecedented rise in the wake of the digital revolution; with wide-scale downloading and sharing of copyrighted media online, often committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Bringing together perspectives from criminology, psychology, business, and adopting a morally neutral stance, this book offers a holistic overview of this growing phenomenon. It considers its cultural, commercial, and legal aspects, and brings together international research on a range of topics, such as copyright infringement, intellectual property, music publishing, movie piracy, and changes in consumer behaviour. This book offers a new perspective to the growing literature on cybercrime and digital security. This multi-disciplinary book is the first to bring together international research on digital piracy and will be key reading for researchers in the fields of criminology, psychology, law and business.

A New Framework for Intermediary Liability presents a step-by-step framework for determining when internet intermediaries ought to have a duty to act to prevent copyright infringement on their platforms and services.

Metaphors, moral panics, folk devils, Jack Valenti, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, predictable irrationality, and free market fundamentalism are a few of the topics covered in this lively, unflinching examination of the Copyright Wars: the pitched battles over new technology, business models, and most of all, consumers. In Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, William Patry lays bare how we got to where we are: a bloated, punitive legal regime that has strayed far from its modest, but important roots. Patry demonstrates how copyright is a utilitarian government program--not a property or moral right. As a government program, copyright must be regulated and held accountable to ensure it is serving its public purpose. Just as Wall Street must serve Main Street, neither can copyright be left to a Reaganite "magic of the market." The way we have come to talk about copyright--metaphoric language demonizing everyone involved--has led to bad business and bad policy decisions. Unless we recognize that the debates over copyright are debates over business models, we will never be able to make the correct business and policy decisions. A centrist and believer in appropriately balanced copyright laws, Patry concludes that calls for strong copyright laws, just like calls for weak copyright laws, miss the point entirely: the only laws we need are effective laws, laws that further the purpose of encouraging the creation of new works and learning. Our current regime, unfortunately, creates too many bad incentives, leading to bad conduct. Just as President Obama has called for re-tooling and re-imagining the auto industry, Patry calls for a remaking of our copyright laws so that they may once again be respected.

Through an analysis of the legal and public debate about copyright in a digital age, this book shows how the stories told by participants shape our cultural understanding of the role of the Internet in cultural production.