Contents

Cover

Title

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

Sharing: Crime Against Capitalism?
Alternative Business Models or Alternatives to Business?
The Economics of Sharing and of Capitalism
The Structure of the Book
What Sharing? And (more to the point) What is Sharing?

2 Libraries and the Digital World

Introduction
Information: Culture or Capital
Literacy, Education and Libraries
Digital Revolutions One and Two
Internet and Access
Digital Commons: The Anarchist in the Library
Orphan Works: The Capitalist in the Archive
Libraries as Records of Ownership and/or the Common Heritage of Humanity
Plagiarism vs. Piracy
From Scarcity to Authority
Conclusions: Free Culture or Fee Culture

3 Peer-to-Peer Music Sharing Online

Introduction
From CDs to Napster: The Rise of Peer-to-Peer
From Napster to Now
The Myth of The Recording Artist (Then and Now)
The ‘Romantic’ Myth of the Recording Artist
Why Sign?
Why Not Sign?
The Rise of Live
Adaptive (iTunes and Spotify) vs. Alternative (Sharingand Selling-Based) Business Models
Conclusions: Reversing the Menu and the Meal

4 Live-streaming and Television Rights Management

Introduction
The First Digital Revolution in Television: Pay-to-View Enclosure
The Second Digital Revolution: Free-Sharing Livestreams
Justin.TV, First Row Sports and Wiziwig: Network Enterprises and their Users
Sky’s the Limit? The Limits of Power and Counterpower
Conclusions: Power and Counterpower in Digital Networks

5 Open-Source Software and Proprietary Software

Introduction
The Spirit of the Information Age: Hackers, Rebel Code and Play Struggle
Digital Rights Management
Peer-to-Peer Software
Non-Profit Organizations in the Information Economy
Computer Games
Platforms, Programmes and the Limits of Property
Conclusions: Sharing, the Gift Economy, Play Struggle and Creativity

6 Publishing: Academic, Journalistic and Trade

Introduction
Academic Publishing
Journalistic Publishing: The Editorial Nexus and Beyond?
Trade Publishing: Capitalist Concentration
The Long Tail and the Real Lives of Authors
Is First Mover Advantage Enough?
Conclusions: Recognition, Valuation and Innovation

7 Genes, Genetically Modified Organisms, Patents and Agribusiness

Introduction
‘The Genetic Commons’: Human and Non-Human Nature
Culture: Heritage and Public Sphere
Discovery and Invention: On Patents and the Public Domain
Science as Method and Colonial Appropriation
‘Reinventing’ ‘Nature’: Undoing the Discovery/Intention Distinction via Genetically Modified Organisms
Patenting Human Gene Lines
Terminator Genes and Food Security
Alternatives and Critiques
The Common Heritage of Humanity: Seeds, Plants and Farmers’ Rights
Traditional Knowledge Banks
Biopiracy against Whom?
The Human Genome Project
Public Knowledge? deCode Genetics, the Public as Private and Vice Versa
The Eureka Myth
Genetics and the Law
Conclusions: Common Heritage and Sharing Knowledge Production

8 Pharmaceutical Patents and Generic Drugs

Introduction
Ebola
AZT: A History of Control
Bold Claims
Who Pays and What Gets Bought?
Patent and Medical Innovation
One Way Street: The Case of Anthrax and National Security
Generic Medicines
Faking Fakes: The Attempt to Present Generics as Counterfeits
HIV in South Africa, Brazil and Elsewhere
Conclusions: Sharing Knowledge and Improving Human Health

9 Conclusions: Sharing – Crime against Capitalism

Introduction
The Efficiency of Sharing
The Efficacy of Sharing: Fostering Quality and Access
The Incentive Structures of Sharing
Sharing’s Challenge to the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons
Sharing and the Triumph of the Commons?
Global Network Capitalism
Power and Counterpower in the Global Network Society
Only a Return – to Advertiser Funding?
The Rise of ‘Live’: Unmediated Mediation
The Criminalization or the Colonization of Free-Sharing?
A Gift Economy?
Sharing: A Crime Against Capitalism

References

Index

End User License Agreement

The right of Matthew David to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the various coauthors whose thinking on sharing I have shared (Jack Birmingham, Debbie Halbert, Jamie Kirkhope, Andrew Kirton, Peter Millward and Natasha Whiteman); to those authors whose work I coedited (and thereby internalized) for the Sage Handbook of Intellectual Property (all fifty of you); to those who shared their wisdom in editing this and earlier works of mine on post-scarcity sharing (in particular Anna Davies, Bill Dutton, Richard Giulianotti, David Held, Julia Knight, James Milton, Eva-Maria Nag, Raphaël Nowak, Chris Rojek and Andrew Whelan); to the many nameless but invaluable peer reviewers down the years; to Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study for hosting discussions that facilitated this work; and to those participants in discussions at Cardiff University, CUNY, SUNY, London’s City University and Queen Mary College, Oxford’s Internet Institute and Department of Music, the University of Utrecht’s Workshop on the Sharing Economy, and Durham University’s Café Politique, where the ideas presented in this book were presented and critiqued. Particular thanks to Sarah Dancy, Rachel Moore, Jonathan Skerrett and Amy Williams at Polity Press for getting things into shape. Finally, I would especially like to thank all the students over the years who have taken my various cybercrime and cyberculture modules. They taught me a lot and I hope they learned something from all the free downloaded versions of my work they seemed always able to find.