Adrian Johns: Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009)

Since the rise of Napster and other file sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.

Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Written with a historian’s flair for narrative and sparkling detail, the book swarms throughout with characters of genius, principle, cunning, and outright criminal intent: in the wars over piracy, it is the victims—from Charles Dickens to Bob Dylan—who have always been the best known, but the principal players—the pirates themselves—have long languished in obscurity, and it is their stories especially that Johns brings to life in these vivid pages.

Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 978-0-226-40118-8, 0-226-40118-9
Length 626 pages

publisher
google books

Download

Laura Denardis: Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (2009)

The Internet has reached a critical point. The world is running out of Internet addresses. There is a finite supply of approximately 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—the unique binary numbers required for every exchange of information over the Internet—within the Internet’s prevailing technical architecture (IPv4). In the 1990s the Internet standards community identified the potential depletion of these addresses as a crucial design concern and selected a new protocol (IPv6) that would expand the number of Internet addresses exponentially—to 340 undecillion addresses. Despite a decade of predictions about imminent global conversion, IPv6 adoption has barely begun. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and the ultimate success of IPv6 depends on a critical mass of IPv6 deployment, even among users who don’t need it, or on technical workarounds that could in turn create a new set of concerns.

Protocol Politics examines what’s at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Laura DeNardis’s key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 serves as a case study for how protocols more generally are intertwined with socioeconomic and political order. IPv6 intersects with provocative topics including Internet civil liberties, U.S. military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. DeNardis offers recommendations for Internet standards governance, based not only on technical concerns but on principles of openness and transparency, and examines the global implications of looming Internet address scarcity versus the slow deployment of the new protocol designed to solve this problem.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Series: Information Revolution and Global Politics
ISBN 0262042576, 9780262042574
Length 272 pages

publisher
google books

Download

Artur-Axel Wandtke (ed.): Medienrecht: Praxishandbuch (2008) [German]

Dem “Medienrecht” als Gestaltungsmittel in den Informations- und Kommunikationsprozessen kommt in der praktischen Unternehmenskultur und in der Rechtsdurchsetzung eine immer größer werdende Bedeutung zu. Wirtschaftlich gewinnen die rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen der Informations- und Kommunikationsprozesse in der geistigen Produktion und deren Verwertungsbedingungen immer mehr an Gewicht. Werbemaßnahmen, Merchandising, Public Relations, kommerzialisierte Persönlichkeitsrechte, Telemedien, Online-Nutzung, Presseprodukte, Film- und Fernsehwerke und andere Erscheinungsformen stehen stellvertretend für eine Individual- und Massenkommunikation, die im herkömmlichen und virtuellen Markt eine entscheidende Rolle spielen.

Mit diesem Handbuch wird auf wissenschaftlicher Grundlage eine Gesamtdarstellung vor allem der privatrechtlichen Medienprozesse vorgelegt, die im Zusammenhang mit der Produktion und Vermarktung bzw. Nutzung von Zeichen, Bildern, Tönen und anderen Informationen (Medienprodukten) entstehen. Dabei werden auch die europarechtlichen Aspekte der Entwicklung des Medienrechts dargestellt.

Publisher Walter de Gruyter, 2008
ISBN 3899494229, 9783899494228
Length 1932 pages

publisher
google books

Download

Christine L. Borgman: Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007)

Scholars in all fields now have access to an unprecedented wealth of online information, tools, and services. The Internet lies at the core of an information infrastructure for distributed, data-intensive, and collaborative research. Although much attention has been paid to the new technologies making this possible, from digitized books to sensor networks, it is the underlying social and policy changes that will have the most lasting effect on the scholarly enterprise. In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine Borgman explores the technical, social, legal, and economic aspects of the kind of infrastructure that we should be building for scholarly research in the twenty-first century.

Borgman describes the roles that information technology plays at every stage in the life cycle of a research project and contrasts these new capabilities with the relatively stable system of scholarly communication, which remains based on publishing in journals, books, and conference proceedings. No framework for the impending “data deluge” exists comparable to that for publishing. Analyzing scholarly practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Borgman compares each discipline’s approach to infrastructure issues. In the process, she challenges the many stakeholders in the scholarly infrastructure—scholars, publishers, libraries, funding agencies, and others—to look beyond their own domains to address the interaction of technical, legal, economic, social, political, and disciplinary concerns. Scholarship in the Digital Age will provoke a stimulating conversation among all who depend on a rich and robust scholarly environment.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262026198, 9780262026192
Length 336 pages

publisher
google books

Download

Adam Haupt: Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion (2008)

Stealing Empire poses the question, “What possibilities for agency exist in the age of corporate globalisation?” Using the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt as a point of entry, Adam Haupt delves into varied terrain to locate answers in this ground-breaking inquiry. He explores arguments about copyright via peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms such as Napster, free speech struggles, debates about access to information and open content licenses, and develops a politically incisive analysis of counterdiscourses produced by South African hip-hop artists. From ‘empire stealing’ through their commodification of countercultures to the ‘stealing empire’ activities of file-sharers, culture jammers and hip-hop activists, this book tells the story of people defining themselves as active, creative agents in a consumerist society.

Stealing Empire is vital reading for law, media and cultural studies scholars who want to make sense of the ways in which legal and communication strategies are employed to secure hegemony.

Publisher Human Sciences Research Council, 2008
ISBN 0796922098, 9780796922090
Length 272 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (author)
More info (google books)

Download (from publisher)
Download podcast (from publisher)

Angharad N. Valdivia (ed.): A Companion to Media Studies (2005)

A Companion to Media Studies is a comprehensive collection that brings together new writings by some of the most respected canonical and contemporary media studies scholars to provide an overview of the theories and methodologies that have produced this most interdisciplinary of fields.

* Brings together new writings by some of the most respected canonical and contemporary media studies scholars in the most comprehensive collection on media studies to date.
* Tackles a variety of central concepts and controversies, organized into six areas of study: foundations, production, media content, media audiences, effects, and futures.
* Provides an accessible point of entry into this expansive and interdisciplinary field.
* Includes the writings of renowned media scholars, including McQuail, Schiller, Gallagher, Wartella, and Bryant.

Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 2005
ISBN 1405141743, 9781405141741
Length 590 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

Download

YiJun Tian: Re-thinking Intellectual Property. The Political Economy of Copyright Protection in the Digital Era (2008)

Copyright laws, along with other Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), constitute the legal foundation for the “global knowledge-based economy” and copyright law now plays an increasingly important role in the creation of business fortunes, the access to and dissemination of knowledge, and human development in general.

This book examines major problems in the current IPR regime, particularly the copyright regime, in the context of digitization, knowledge economy, and globalization. The book contends that the final goals of IP law and policy-making are to enhance the progress of science and economic development, and the use and even-distribution of intellectual resource at the global level. By referring to major international IP consensus, recent developments in regional IP forums and the successful experiences of various countries, YiJun Tian is able to provide specific theoretical, policy and legislative suggestions for addressing current copyright challenges. The book contends that each nation should strengthen the coordination of its IP protection and development strategies, adopt a more systematic and heterogeneous approach, and make IP theory, policy, specific legal mechanisms, marketing forces and all other available measures work collectively to deal with digital challenges and in a way that contributes to the establishment of a knowledge equilibrium international society.

Publisher Taylor & Francis, 2008
ISBN 0415465346, 9780415465342
Length 338 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

Download

Joseph William Singer: Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property (2000)

In this important work of legal, political, and moral theory, Joseph William Singer offers a controversial new view of property and the entitlements and obligations of its owners. Singer argues against the conventional understanding that owners have the right to control their property as they see fit, with few limitations by government. Instead, property should be understood as a mode of organizing social relations, he says, and he explains the potent consequences of this idea.

Singer focuses on the ways in which property law reflects and shapes social relationships. He contends that property is a matter not of right but of entitlement—and entitlement, in Singer’s work, is a complex accommodation of mutual claims. Property requires regulation—property is a system and not just an individual entitlement, and the system must support a form of social life that spreads wealth, promotes liberty, avoids undue concentration of power, and furthers justice. The author argues that owners have not only rights but obligations as well—to other owners, to nonowners, and to the community as a whole. Those obligations ensure that property rights function to shape social relationships in ways that are both just and defensible.

Publisher Yale University Press, 2000
ISBN 0300080190, 9780300080193
Length 241 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

Download

Andrew Keen: The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture (2007)

Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement. Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors. In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented. The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite—Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself—he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions. Offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us.

Publisher Doubleday/Currency, 2007
Original from the University of California
ISBN 0385520808, 9780385520805
Length 228 pages

More info (wikipedia)
More info (google books)

Download

Peter Drahos, John Braithwaite: Information Feudalism. Who Owns the Knowledge Economy (2002)

New intellectual property regimes are entrenching new inequalities. Access to information is fundamental to the exercise of human rights and marketplace competition, but patents are being used to lock up vital educational, software, genetic and other information, creating a global property order dominated by a multinational elite. How did intellectual property rules become part of the World Trade Organization’s free trade agreements? How have these rules changed the knowledge game for international business? What are the consequences for the ownership of biotechnology and digital technology, and for all those who have to pay for what was once shared information? Based on extensive interviews with key players, this book tells the story of these profound transformations in information ownership. The authors argue that in the globalized information society, the rich have found new ways to rob the poor, and shows how intellectual property rights can be more democratically defined.

Publisher Earthscan, 2002
ISBN 1853839175, 9781853839177
Length 253 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

Download

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001)

Copyright reflects far more than economic interests. Embedded within conflicts over royalties and infringement are cultural values—about race, class, access, ownership, free speech, and democracy—which influence how rights are determined and enforced. Questions of legitimacy—of what constitutes “intellectual property” or “fair use,” and of how to locate a precise moment of cultural creation—have become enormously complicated in recent years, as advances in technology have exponentially increased the speed of cultural reproduction and dissemination.

In Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidhyanathan tracks the history of American copyright law through the 20th century, from Mark Twain’s vehement exhortations for “thick” copyright protection, to recent lawsuits regarding sampling in rap music and the “digital moment,” exemplified by the rise of Napster and MP3 technology. He argues persuasively that in its current punitive, highly restrictive form, American copyright law hinders cultural production, thereby contributing to the poverty of civic culture.

In addition to choking cultural expression, recent copyright law, Vaidhyanathan argues, effectively sanctions biases against cultural traditions which differ from the Anglo-European model. In African-based cultures, borrowing from and building upon earlier cultural expressions is not considered a legal trespass, but a tribute. Rap and hip hop artists who practice such “borrowing” by sampling and mixing, however, have been sued for copyright violation and forced to pay substantial monetary damages. Similarly, the oral transmission of culture, which has a centuries-old tradition within African American culture, is complicated by current copyright laws. How, for example, can ownership of music, lyrics, or stories which have been passed down through generations be determined? Upon close examination, strict legal guidelines prove insensitive to the diverse forms of cultural expression prevalent in the United States, and reveal much about the racialized cultural values which permeate our system of laws. Ultimately, copyright is a necessary policy that should balance public and private interests but the recent rise of “intellectual property” as a concept have overthrown that balance. Copyright, Vaidhyanathan asserts, is policy, not property.

Bringing to light the republican principles behind original copyright laws as well as present-day imbalances and future possibilities for freer expression and artistic equity, this volume takes important strides towards unraveling the complex web of culture, law, race, and technology in today’s global marketplace.

Publisher New York University Press, 2001
ISBN 0-8147-8806-8
Length 256 pages

Keywords and phrases
Mark Twain, Napster, Pac-man, U.S. Supreme Court, D. W. Griffith, African American, Ben-Hur, Led Zeppelin, Marx Brothers, Statute of Anne, Willie Dixon, rhythm and blues, Groucho Marx, Martha Graham, DMCA, U.S. Congress, Schoolly D, intellectual property, rap music, He’s So Fine

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

Download

Kembrew McLeod: Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property (2007)

Freedom of Expression® covers the ways in which intellectual property laws have been used to privatize all forms of expression—from guitar riffs and Donald Trump’s “you’re fired” gesture to human genes and public space—and in the process stifle creative expression. Kembrew McLeod challenges the blind embrace of privatization as it clashes against our right to free speech and shared resources.

This book’s documentary companion will be available through Media Education Foundation.

Table of Contents
Foreword: An Ideal Lawyer-Citizen (by Lawrence Lessig)
Introduction
1. This Gene Is Your Gene: Fencing Off the Folk and Genetic Commons
2. Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport
3. Illegal Art: When Art Gets in Trouble with the Law, Art Gives the Law Trouble Back
4. Culture, Inc.: Our Hyper-Referential, Branded Culture
5. Our Privatized World: Selling Off the Public Square, Culture, Education, Our Democracy, and Everything Else
6. The Digital Future: And the Analog Past
Afterword: Freedom of Expression®
Epilogue: The Day I Killed Freedom of Expression

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816650314, 9780816650316
Length 379 pages

The PDF Version of the book is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

More info (author)
More info (wikipedia)
More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

Download (PDF)
Direct download (PDF of QXD file)

James Boyle: The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (2008)

In this enlightening book, James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age – today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and today’s policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation. Boyle identifies as a major problem the widespread failure to understand the importance of the public domain – the realm of material that everyone is free to use and share without permission or fee. The public domain is as vital to innovation and culture as the realm of material protected by intellectual property rights, he asserts, and he calls for a movement akin to the environmental movement to preserve it. With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, synthetic biology and Internet file sharing, this timely book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates. If we continue to enclose the ‘commons of the mind’, Boyle argues, we will all be the poorer.

Publisher Yale University Press, 2008
ISBN 0300137400, 9780300137408
Length 315 pages

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

More info (author)
More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

Direct download
Download

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-peer Debates

PEERS, PIRATES, AND PERSUASION: RHETORIC IN THE PEER-TO-PEER DEBATES investigates the role of rhetoric in shaping public perceptions about a novel technology: peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. While broadband Internet services now allow speedy transfers of complex media files, Americans face real uncertainty about whether peer-to-peer file sharing is or should be legal. John Logie analyzes the public arguments growing out of more than five years of debate sparked by the advent of Napster, the first widely adopted peer-to-peer technology. The debate continues with the second wave of peer-to-peer file transfer utilities like Limewire, KaZaA, and BitTorrent. With PEERS, PIRATES, AND PERSUASION, Logie joins the likes of Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Jessica Litman, and James Boyle in the ongoing effort to challenge and change current copyright law so that it fulfills its purpose of fostering creativity and innovation while protecting the rights of artists in an attention economy. Logie examines metaphoric frames-warfare, theft, piracy, sharing, and hacking, for example-that dominate the peer-to-peer debates and demonstrably shape public policy on the use and exchange of digital media. PEERS, PIRATES, AND PERSUASION identifies the Napster case as a failed opportunity for a productive national discussion on intellectual property rights and responsibilities in digital environments. Logie closes by examining the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the “Grokster” case, in which leading peer-to-peer companies were found to be actively inducing copyright infringement. The Grokster case, Logie contends, has already produced the chilling effects that will stifle the innovative spirit at theheart of the Internet and networked communities. ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Logie is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-peer Debates
by John Logie
Edition: illustrated
Parlor Press, 2006
ISBN 1602350051, 9781602350052
164 pages

Download

Pirates of the Digital Millennium: How the Intellectual Property Wars Damage Our Personal Freedoms, Our Jobs, and the World Economy

Covers intellectual property wars: every side, the implications, the economics, the law, the ethics, the players, and the realities, including the findings of a 57-country digital piracy research project and survey and focus group research.

Pirates of the Digital Millennium: How the Intellectual Property Wars Damage Our Personal Freedoms, Our Jobs, and the World Economy
By John Gantz, Jack B. Rochester
Edition: illustrated
Published by Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2004
ISBN 0131463152, 9780131463158
294 pages

Download