Scary Monsters? Software Formats,Peer-to-Peer Networks,and the Spectre of the Gift

In this paper I focus upon a sociotechnical network made possible through the combination of software, the Internet, and peer-to-peer computer networks. These sociotechnical networks have destabilised the regime of governance that supports what I describe in the paper as copyright capitalism by creating a series of gift economies where the products of those industries are given away. This development has significance for a wide range of creative industries that are dependent upon copyright protection for their reproduction, including motion pictures, publishing, and software engineering. The main empirical focus of this paper is the music industry because it is there that the challenge to the mode of reproduction of copyright capitalism has been most acute. I look at the origins of these gift economies, which can be traced back to the academic roots of the Internet. A musical gift economy centred upon MP3 (a software format) emerged during the early 1990s, but was only constituted as a problem for the music industry after the commercial invasion of the Internet during the late 1990s. Dot.com start-ups transformed the specialised knowledge that was once the preserve of hackers and hobbyists into generic knowledge through the development of ‘user-friendly’ file-exchange systems, thereby providing mass access to a once underground musical gift economy. Copyright capitalists mobilised the powers of law enforcement to reassert their control over the circulation of recorded music, and have successfully tamed many of the firms that sought to extend this gift economy for commercial gain. However, there has emerged a set of networks that are both ideologically and substantively opposed to the interests of copyright capitalism, and that are more resistant to attempts to reassert the control of the large corporations. In this paper I argue that the continued existence of these networks will undermine the ability of large media companies to control copyright in the way they have in the past. Although the communities that facilitate such economies are themselves unstable and rely, like other ‘alternative’ economic systems, upon a narrow band of active participants, such gift economies may emerge as the most significant and problematic legacy of the ‘new economy’.