Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

The Criminalization of Sharing

"Matthew David has done a rare and valuable thing with this work. He has comprehensively exposed the inherent radicalism of peer-to-peer communication and exposed the absurdities of the various efforts to quash the practice and technologies. This book is certain to outlast the recording industry."  —Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia

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.

It will be of interest to students of sociology, criminology, media and communications and cultural studies.