Collaboration in Online Communities: Reconceptualising the Complex Problem of Unauthorised Music File Sharing

This empirical paper explores the complex problem space of unauthorised music file sharing, providing insight into collaboration activities in online communities. As many consumers now access their music through unauthorised file sharing, it is interesting to consider what makes such communities so attractive. This paper presents the debates surrounding music piracy/file sharing, using a critical perspective to consider ‘another way of doing things’. The arguments in this paper are based on a doctoral study involving 30 interviews, 3 focus groups, and 120 days of participant observation within an underground music file sharing community. Actor- network theory is useful in identifying the controversies in this complex problem space, encouraging a reconceptualisation of file sharers and the information systems they create. These new insights contribute to the literature of information systems development within the context of online communities

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments examines the definition, function, and application of intellectual property in contexts of electronically mediated social production. With a focus on immaterial production - or the forms of coordinated social activity employed to produce knowledge and information in the networked information economy - this project ultimately aims to demonstrate how current intellectual property paradigms must be rearticulated for an age of digital (re)production. By considering the themes of Piracy , Intellectual Property , and Distributed Social Production this dissertation provides an overview of the current state of peer production and intellectual property in the Humanities and Writing Studies. Next, this project develops and implements a communicational-mediational research methodology to theorize how both discursive and material data lend themselves to a more nuanced understanding of the ways that technologies of communication and coordination effect attitudes toward intellectual property. After establishing both a methodology and an interdisciplinary grounding for the themes of the work, this dissertation presents a grounded theoretic analysis of piratical discourse to reveal what I call the piratical ethos , or the guiding attitudes of individuals actively contesting intellectual property in piratical acts of distributed social production. Congruently, this work also investigates the material dynamics of piratical activity by analyzing the cultural-historical activity systems wherein piratical subjectivity emerges, emphasizing the agenic capacity of interfacial technologies at the scales of user and system. Exploring the attitudes of piratical subjects and the technological genres that mediate piratical activity, I contend that the conclusions drawn from The Piratical Ethos can assist Writing Studies researchers with developing novel methodologies to study the intersections of intellectual property and distributed social production in digital worlds

Downloading Doppelgängers: New Media Anxieties and Transnational Ironies in Battlestar Galactica

This essay reads the re-made Battlestar Galactica series—-a 21st-century Frankenstein—-according to the Canadian contexts of its production and the globalized contexts of its distribution, both formal (on cable TV) and informal (on the Internet). Contextualized by the history of media imperialism in Canada, the British Columbia sets and Canadian star casting of the series ironically articulate US-Canadian border and security concerns. Among these articulations, Battlestar focuses particular attention on new media issues, at a moment when the Canadian government responds to pressure from US entertainment interests to align its intellectual property laws with their more punitive American counterparts.SSHR

Online Media Piracy: Convergence, Culture, and the Problem of Media Change

This thesis proposes that there is a symbiotic relationship between the emergence of online media piracy and the industrial, economic and legal changes that have shaped contemporary popular media in the early 21st century. The Internet is at the heart of most recent transformations of the popular media environment, such as the emergence of video-on-demand formats for film and television consumption and the impact this has had on the nature of those media forms. This thesis discusses the powerful role played by online media piracy in shaping these developments, both through changing the expectations of consumers, and the options that are available for distributors of media content. As well as exploring the diverse forms and practices of online media piracy today, this thesis also explores theories of media change, considering how we might understand such piracy as a force underpinning media change, and how the changes it has helped shape might be placed in a broader historical context. To that end, the history and impact of online media piracy are considered alongside other examples, such as the arrival of video recording devices and the expansion of cable television in the 1980s and 90s, and the significance of international trade deals impacting access to media via “geoblocking” and other techniques of access management. Finally, this thesis also examines debates around copyright, and the potential political significance of piracy as a tool for accessing media and culture, viewing online media piracy as a crucial practice appearing at a nexus of industrial and popular interests, tied to technological, economic and legal developments, and to changing consumer behavior and expectations

Institutional Analysis of a Natural History Museum: Formation and dissemination of scientific knowledge

When the canonization of scientific knowledge is considered as a point of sociological inquiry the interrelations of popular culture, commerce, and enterprise become crucial elements to understanding how forms of knowledge are produced and reproduced. Scientific knowledge is an integral part of our social world. We use it to better understand the natural processes behind global climates, health issues, ecology and biology. And yet most individuals outside the field of production are unaware of the processes behind obtaining this knowledge. Museums with research and collections are an arena for this topic. Their operations persist in influencing the selection of knowledge forming fields of study in both direct and indirect ways. In this study, The Field Museum of Natural History is used as a focal point to analyze ways in which the operation of an institution coincides and/or conflicts with scientific research. Data was collected through direct personal observation, interviews and published financial and historical records. Results from this analysis show that institutional operations within a museum persist in influencing the selection of knowledge forming fields of study in both direct and indirect ways and add to the literature on scientific knowledge

The internet as a catalyst for microdeviation: An integrated theory of digital music piracy

Digital music piracy has persisted as a contested form of online deviance for more than two decades, garnering social, industry, and legislative responses. This dissertation outlines an integrated approach to explain this form of deviance through a combination of the networked society, social learning, and moral disengagement theories. This approach was developed based on three hypotheses; first, that technological competency defines online experience; second, that online experiences dictate the form of social learning encountered by users; and third, users’ social learning experiences shape the way they neutralize their deviance. The hypotheses were empirically tested using a data set of 616 cases drawn from a self-administered online survey. Linear regression analyses were conducted for each test and statistically significant models as well as linkages were developed for each hypothesis; however, moderately strong findings in some cases suggest that additional theory considerations should be made. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of the study’s implications, particularly as they relate to an increasingly pluralistic internet

Resistance commons : file-sharing litigation and the social system of commoning

textThis dissertation is an investigation into the practice of peer-to-peer file-sharing and the litigation campaign targeting individual file-sharers carried out by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) from 2003 to 2008. The competing conceptualizations of social relations which motivate the conflict over peer-to-peer file-sharing are explored using a combination of Autonomist Marxist theory and structuration theory. Peer-to-peer file-sharing is framed as part of the social system of commoning stemming from the recent ascendancy of immaterial labor within that sector of the economy dedicated to the production and distribution of informational and cultural goods. The RIAA litigation campaign is framed as a reaction to the emergence of new forms of social relations which are seen by the content-producing industries as subversive of revenue streams premised on commodity exchange in informational and cultural goods. The history of the RIAA litigation campaign is presented in detail with careful attention given to those instances in which defendants and other interested parties fought back against RIAA legal actions. The acts of resistance within the legal arena affected the ultimate potential of the litigation campaign to control the spread of file-sharing activities. Subsequent legal campaigns which have been based on the RIAA litigation model are also examined. These later file-sharing cases have been met with similar forms of resistance which have likewise mitigated the impact of legal efforts to combat file-sharing. In addition, a survey of file-sharers is included in this research as part of an attempt to understand the relationship between legal actions targeting peer-to-peer systems and individual file-sharers and the technological and social development of peer-to-peer systems. This research argues that file-sharing litigation has proven ineffective in turning back the flood of file-sharing and may have increased the technological sophistication and community ties among file-sharers. In the end, the conflict over peer-to-peer file-sharing is cast as a manifestation of a larger dynamic of capitalist crisis as content-producing industries attempt to come to terms with the contradictory tendencies of immaterial labor and the production of common pools of digital resources.Radio-Television-Fil

The Promise of Internet Intermediary Liability

The Internet has transformed the economics of communication, creating a spirited debate about the proper role of federal, state, and international governments in regulating conduct related to the Internet. Many argue that Internet communications should be entirely self-regulated because such communications cannot or should not be the subject of government regulation. The advocates of that approach would prefer a no-regulation zone around Internet communications, based largely on the unexamined view that Internet activity is fundamentally different in a way that justifies broad regulatory exemption. At the same time, some kinds of activity that the Internet facilitates undisputedly violate widely shared norms and legal rules. State legislatures motivated by that concern have begun to respond with Internet-specific laws directed at particular contexts, giving little or no credence to the claims that the Internet needs special treatment. This Article starts from the realist assumption that government regulation of the Internet is inevitable. Thus, instead of focusing on the naive question of whether the Internet should be regulated, this Article discusses how to regulate Internet-related activity in a way that is consistent with approaches to analogous offline conduct. The Article also assumes that the Internet\u27s most salient characteristic is that it inserts intermediaries into relationships that could be, and previously would have been, conducted directly in an offline environment. Existing liability schemes generally join traditional fault-based liability rules with broad Internet-specific liability exemptions. Those exemptions are supported by the premise that in many cases the conduct of the intermediaries is so wholly passive as to make liability inappropriate. Over time, this has produced a great volume of litigation, mostly in the context of the piracy of copyrighted works, in which the responsibility of the intermediary generally turns on fault, as measured by the intermediary\u27s level of involvement in the challenged conduct. This Article argues that the pervasive role of intermediaries calls not for a broad scheme of exoneration, premised on passivity, but rather for a more thoughtful development of principles for determining when and how it makes economic sense to allocate responsibility for wrongful conduct to the least cost avoider. The Internet\u27s rise has brought about three changes that make intermediaries more likely to be least cost avoiders in the Internet context than they previously have been in offline contexts: (1) an increase in the likelihood that it will be easy to identify specific intermediaries for large classes of transactions, (2) a reduction in information costs, which makes it easier for the intermediaries to monitor the conduct of end users, and (3) increased anonymity, which makes remedies against end users generally less effective. Accordingly, in cases where intermediaries can feasibly control the conduct, this Article recommends serious attention to the possibility of one of three different schemes of intermediary liability: traditional liability for damages, takedown schemes in which the intermediary must remove offensive content upon proper notice, and \u27hot list schemes in which the intermediary must avoid facilitation of transactions with certain parties. Part III of this Article uses that framework to analyze the propriety of intermediary liability for several kinds of Internet-related misconduct. This Article is agnostic about the propriety of any particular regulatory scheme, recognizing the technological and contextual contingency of any specific proposal. Because any such scheme will impose costs on innocent end users, selecting a particular level of regulation should depend on policymakers\u27 view of the net social benefits of eradicating the misconduct, taking into account the intermediaries\u27 and innocent users\u27 compliance costs associated with the regulation. Still, the analysis of this Article suggests three points. First, the practicality of peer-to-peer distribution networks for the activity in question is an important consideration because those networks undermine the regulatory scheme\u27s effectiveness, thereby making regulation less useful. Second, the highly concentrated market structure of Internet payment intermediaries makes reliance on payment intermediaries particularly effective as a regulatory strategy because of the difficulty illicit actors have in relocating to new payment vehicles. Third, with respect to security harms, such as viruses, spam, phishing, and hacking, this Article concludes that the addition of intermediary liability in those cases is less likely to be beneficial because market incentives appear to be causing intermediaries to undertake substantial efforts to solve these problems without the threat of liability