By examining the centrality of Romantic authorship to both copyright and the music industry, the author highlights the mutual dependence of capitalism and Romanticism, which situates the individual as the key creative force while challenging the commodification of art and self. Marshall reveals how the desire for bootlegs is driven by the same ideals of authenticity employed by the legitimate industry in its copyright rhetoric and practice and demonstrates how bootlegs exist as an antagonistic but necessary component of an industry that does much to prevent them. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students in the sociology of culture, social theory, cultural studies and law.

The Dialectic of Romanticism and the Symbolic Significance of Bootlegging

The Dialectic of Romanticism and the Symbolic Significance of Bootlegging

The dialectic of romanticism and the symbolic significance of bootlegging

Bootlegging is a small scale phenomenon – even during a peak protection gap year like 1993, the street value of bootlegs probably amounted to less than 0.4 per cent of worldwide record sales.1 Yet aside from specific periods of moral panics, such as over MP3 downloading, bootlegs have traditionally been the number one folk devil of the record industry and have generally garnered more headlines than either counterfeits or pirates, despite these other types of illegal recordings being more economically damaging (Heylin, 1994: 230).2 There seems to be little economic logic behind the recording industry's excessive attempts to eliminate bootlegging and we must therefore look beyond ...

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