This Handbook brings together scholars from around the world in addressing the global significance of, controversies over and alternatives to intellectual property (IP) today. It brings together over fifty of the leading authors in this field across the spectrum of academic disciplines, from law, economics, geography, sociology, politics and anthropology. This volume addresses the full spectrum of IP issues including copyright, patent, trademarks and trade secrets, as well as parallel rights and novel applications. In addition to addressing the role of IP in an increasingly information based and globalized economy and culture, it also challenges the utility and viability of IP today and addresses a range of alternative futures.
Designed for social science students with no previous experience, this book provides a balanced foundation in the principles and practices of social research.
Designed for social science students with no previous experience, this book provides a balanced foundation in the principles and practices of social research.
The history of internet research methods is, naturally, much shorter than the histories of other research methods in the social sciences, though no less rich or significant as a result. The early development of distributed networked communications in the 1960s and 1970s can be seen as a relevant pre-history and emergence period for the internet, and consequently the birth of the world wide web in the early 1990s saw the internet truly break out from being a rather technical tool into a more ubiquitous aspect of everyday life. This four-volume collection begins with some of the earliest works on what was or was to become the internet, moving methodically through to present-day issues. The esteemed editorial team has selected for inclusion literatures which address a wide range of topics, and the collection is further set in context by an illuminating introductory chapter in Volume 1.
Have the music and movie industries lost the battle to criminalize downloading? 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, David unpacks the economics, psychology and philosophy of file-sharing. The book carefully situates the reader in a field of relevant approaches including network society theory, post-structuralism and ethnographic research. It uses this to launch into a fascinating enquiry into: the rise of file-sharing the challenge to intellectual property law posed by new technologies of communication the social psychology of cyber crime the response of the mass media and multi-national corporations. Matthew David concludes with a balanced, eye-opening assessment of alternative cultural modes of participation and their relationship to cultural capitalism. This is a landmark work in the sociology of popular culture and cultural criminology. It fuses a deep knowledge of the music industry and the new technologies of mass communication with a powerful perspective on how multinational corporations seek to monopolize markets, how international and state agencies defend property, while a global multitude undermine and/or reinvent both.
Have the music and movie industries lost the battle to criminalize downloading? 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, David unpacks the economics, psychology and philosophy of file-sharing. The book carefully situates the reader in a field of relevant approaches including network society theory, post-structuralism and ethnographic research. It uses this to launch into a fascinating enquiry into: the rise of file-sharing the challenge to intellectual property law posed by new technologies of communication the social psychology of cyber crime the response of the mass media and multi-national corporations. Matthew David concludes with a balanced, eye-opening assessment of alternative cultural modes of participation and their relationship to cultural capitalism. This is a landmark work in the sociology of popular culture and cultural criminology. It fuses a deep knowledge of the music industry and the new technologies of mass communication with a powerful perspective on how multinational corporations seek to monopolize markets, how international and state agencies defend property, while a global multitude undermine and/or reinvent both.
Intellectual Property and Global Network Capitalism
Formally, ownership of ideas is legally impossible, and can never be globally secured. Yet, in very real and significant ways these limits have been undone. In principle, ideas cannot be owned, yet, undoing the distinction between ideas and tangible manifestations, the distinction which underpins the principle, allows the principle to hold even whilst its meaning is hollowed out. Post-Cold War global network capitalism is premised upon regulatory structures designed to enforce deregulation in global markets and production, but at the same time to enforce global regulation of property and intellectual property in particular. However, this roll-out has not been without resistance and limitations. Globalization, the affordances of digital networks, and contradiction within capitalism itself - between private property and free markets - promote and undo global IP expansion. In this book David and Halbert map the rise of global IP protectionism, debunk the key justifications given for IPRs, dismiss the arguments put forward for global extension and harmonization; and suggest that roll-back, suspension, and even simply the bi-passing of IP in practice offer better solutions for promoting innovation and meeting human needs.
Should cultural meaning be understood in terms of psychological motivations and intentions, or in terms of collective codes and belief systems? Max Weber saw the task of the interpretive sociologist as that of reconstructing the objective and subjective rationality of ideal typical actors. Neo-Kantians, phenomenologists, critical interpretivists, pragmatists, symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists, cultural anthropologists and others have struggled for over a century over what such an approach entails. The development of an interpretive or verstehen approach to understanding social life draws itself in distinction from approaches that seek causal explanation in terms of variables external to the beliefs of social actors, but this collection attempts to disrupt the comfortable polarities between macro and micro, structure and agency, explanation and description that dog sociology and through which the term interpretive has been quarantined.
