Fighting the War on File Sharing

by Aernout Schmidt, Wilfred Dolfsma, Wim Keuvelaar

The explosive growth of the Napster and KaZaA services shows that peer-to-peer file sharing has tremendous appeal in our information society. Nevertheless, current legal and economic practices prevent that these services achieve their full potential. Fighting the War on File Sharing looks into the issue from the perspectives of IT, economics and law and combines the results, pointing out ways how to reduce its escalation and to end the war.


The approach and the solutions reached recognize the influence of outstanding work produced in different disciplines, such as law and information technology (Lessig), political anthropology (Douglas, Geertz, Smits), new institutional economics (Coase, North, Greif) and jurisprudence (Fuller, Bobbitt, Tamanaha).


This book is very important to anyone concerned about how intellectual property law, economics and rhetoric fuel the war on file sharing, and, in general, to everyone interested in the future of the Media Industry on Internet.


Aernout Schmidt and Wim Keuvelaar are both affiliated to elaw@Leiden, Centre for Law in the Information Society at Leiden University. Wilfred Dolfsma is affiliated to the Utrecht School of Economics and to Maastricht University (UNU-MERIT).


This is Volume 14 in the Information Technology and Law (IT&Law) Series

230 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 2007

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very academic - which means that it tends to be quite dry and somewhat boring. There are some interesting bits, but they are well-hidden and far too infrequent. Overall, it most struck me how much time went into the creation of this book and then its limited usefulness, especially when viewed from ongoing and impending change. It will not be long before the book is totally dated although that part is not the fault of the authors.