New peer-reviewed academic article: “The origins and impacts of Swedish file-sharing: A case study” in the new journal Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP). Short abstract: If it is possible to speak of a coherent file-sharing movement in Sweden, what … Continue reading
I have published a new article. It’s about the activist subject and the pirate subject – and how it seems impossible to maintain agential “purity” in an era of increasing infrastructural and agential complexity. My argument, in short, is that the forms of activism found online, connected to what is commonly called the “pirate” movement, are hard to separate from consumerism and entrepreneurialism. Continue reading
Following the verdict from the Swedish Court of Appeal in the famous Pirate Bay copyright infringement case, this is my critique of how one-sided the notion of “benefit to society” is in the grounds for this ruling. Continue reading
Bennett Lincoff proposes a digital transmission right for the Internet. He argues that the Net is fundamentally incompatible with the old business model of selling individual copies of popular culture. In his proposal, a digital transmission right would replace copyright as we currently know it on the Internet. In this posting, I reflect on his proposal from various points of view. Continue reading
Last week’s Economist featured one of the best articles on the new media landscape in a good while. Backed by solid statistics, for once, this article observed a tendency that I and many others have suspected for a long while now: Digitization benefits niche content and blockbusters, rather than the middle category of “near-hits” or “mid-list” titles. What is booming in an Internet-driven marketplace are the two extreme ends of “the long tail”, not the middle bit. I present a summary of their article, with some additional comments. Continue reading
There are two major problems still facing us, regardless of how much we praise amateur forms of cultural production and organisation: (1) the ability to uphold a mode of production that is not only restricted to afternoons and evenings, and (2) the ability to reach out to more people than only those closely concerned. Both of these require economic muscle and structural support that is no longer there, at least not in the same way. Are all cultural producers now forced to become entrepreneurs? Continue reading
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