Fighting the war on file sharing

de A. H. J. Schmidt, Aernout Schmidt, Wilfred Dolfsma, Wim Keuvelaar

Fighting the War on File Sharing aims at a multi-faceted understanding of why peer-to-peer services currently fail to gain their full potential in our society. The analysis focuses on music-file sharing. Three parts of the book ('The Morality of Regulation by Architecture', 'The Economics of Peer-to-Peer in Music' and 'Intellectual Property Rights for Music File Sharing' investigate the positions and opinions that individual disciplines can offer. As these analyses yield partial solutions, the final part of the book provides an institutional framework and applies it to produce new and crisp results on a tough, otherwise almost comprehensively researched subject. The framework recognizes the influence of outstanding work from law and information technology (Lessig), political anthropology (Douglas, Geertz, Smits), new institutional economics (Coase, North, Greif) and jurisprudence (Fuller, Bobbitt, Tamanaha). Its application allows a glimpse of veritable multidisciplinary co-operation concerning the perplexities of regulating the regularities in our social behaviour.