Fighting the War on File Sharing - (Information Technology and Law) by Aernout Schmidt & Wilfred Dolfsma & Wim Keuvelaar (Hardcover)

About the Book

The authors explore why peer-to-peer services fail to gain their full potential in society.

Book Synopsis

Fighting the War on File Sharing aims at a multi-faceted understanding of why peer-to-peer services currently fail to gain their full potential in our society. The analysis focuses on music-file sharing. Three parts of the book ('The Morality of Regulation by Architecture', 'The Economics of Peer-to-Peer in Music' and 'Intellectual Property Rights for Music File Sharing') investigate the positions and opinions that individual disciplines can offer. As these analyses yield partial solutions, the final part of the book provides an institutional framework and applies it to produce new and crisp results on a tough, otherwise almost comprehensively researched subject. The framework recognizes the influence of outstanding work from law and information technology (Lessig), political anthropology (Douglas, Geertz, Smits), new institutional economics (Coase, North, Greif) and jurisprudence (Fuller, Bobbitt, Tamanaha). Its application allows a glimpse of veritable multidisciplinary co-operation concerning the perplexities of regulating the regularities in our social behaviour.

From the Back Cover

The explosive growth of the Napster and KaZaA services shows that peer-to-peer file sharing has tremendous appeal in our information society. Nevertheless, current legal and economic practices prevent that these services achieve their full potential. Fighting the War on File Sharing looks into the issue from the perspectives of IT, economics and law and combines the results, pointing out ways how to reduce its escalation and to end the war.

The approach and the solutions reached recognize the influence of outstanding work produced in different disciplines, such as law and information technology (Lessig), political anthropology (Douglas, Geertz, Smits), new institutional economics (Coase, North, Greif) and jurisprudence (Fuller, Bobbitt, Tamanaha).

This book is very important to anyone concerned about how intellectual property law, economics and rhetoric fuel the war on file sharing, and, in general, to everyone interested in the future of the Media Industry on Internet.

Aernout Schmidt and Wim Keuvelaar are both affiliated to elaw@Leiden, Centre for Law in the Information Society at Leiden University. Wilfred Dolfsma is affiliated to the Utrecht School of Economics and to Maastricht University (UNU-MERIT).

This is Volume 14 in the Information Technology and Law (IT&Law) Series

Review Quotes

'... contains much that is stimulating to read and to be admired. ... represents a valuable contribution to this important debate.' The Journal of E-Commerce, Technology and Communications