Reciprocity and Sharing in an Underground File Sharing Community

This paper presents an ethnography of an underground music file sharing community. Roswell exists as a means to download and share digital music. The web-based community is based on distributed peer-to-peer technology and uses BitTorrent protocols to share content. Actor-Network Theory is used to understand importance of reciprocity and sharing in an online file sharing community, and the role that obligations and banishment play in encouraging active participation. This paper contributes to the Information Systems literature by applying Actor- Network Theory to an ethnographic empirical study of an online music community

Covering music file-sharing and the future of innovation

This paper explores the coverage of file–sharing from before the RIAA/Napster trial of 2000, drawing on interviews with journalists from the New York Times, Wired, Salon and the Los Angeles Times and on analysis of their stories and columns of opinion. It argues the file–sharing story saw “establishment” journalists unapologetically move away from long–established norms of journalism — by relying on alternative sources and by frankly including their own points of view, for example. The course of the stories these journalists produced points to the tensions that continue to mount in the new–media news landscape and to the forces that shape stories in the mainstream press. For more than a decade U.S. journalists lingered on the margins of profound questions about the limits of freedom under the rule of the market. Yet, with the emergence of the recording industry into the online music scene, journalists backed off, leaving the questions they raised unanswered and the larger issues behind the questions mostly unaddressed