Summary
Contents
Subject index
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. 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.
Markets and Monopolies in Informational Goods: Intellectual Property Rights and Protectionism
Markets and Monopolies in Informational Goods: Intellectual Property Rights and Protectionism
- Introduction
- Intellectual property: an essential contradiction
- The pre-history of patents and copyrights
- Non-rivalousness
- Natural rights discourses versus utilitarian balance of interest constructions
- American, British and French traditions: freedom, control and Enlightenment
- Towards an international system, but slowly
- Hollywood pirates, Mark Twain and Mickey Mouse
- The fall and resurgence of international IP regulation
- Fee culture or free culture?
- The young versus the old
- Conclusions: competition versus closure
Introduction
The social nature of property rights is readily apparent through historical and geographical comparison (Marshall 2005, May and Sell 2005), but natural justice arguments for property rights remain (Vaidhyanathan 2003, Lessig 2004). Scarcity and the physical limits of material objects provide a metaphor for claims regarding ‘natural’ monopoly. ‘You can't ...
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