James Allen-Robertson - Digital Culture Industry: A History of Digital Distribution

Digital Culture Industry

Digital Culture Industry

A History of Digital Distribution

James Allen-Robertson

James Allen-Robertson 2013

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First published 2013 by

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Contents

and Napster: The Entrepreneurs of Risk

Figures

Acknowledgements

As the hacker ethic would have us believe, no work can be attributed to a single individual. It is certainly true in this case; though I am the only named author, this book was a community effort. I would like to thank Kate, my patient and supportive wife, whose handiwork can be seen in the figures throughout. I would like to thank Neil Renton for putting me on this path, as well as Professor Roger Burrows, Dr David Beer, Brian Loader and Dr Martin Dodge for their guidance and comments throughout. I thank Professor Samuelson at Berkley Law for answering my questions on the esoteric US copyright law. Finally, I thank the infinite population of bloggers, tweeters, commenters and archivers that produced and curated the huge archive of documents that made this work possible.

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/F03587X/1).

Glossary of Terms

Introduction

The trial of the pirate kings

On 16 February 2009, four men stood accused of the promotion and facilitation of copyright infringement. The four defendants, Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrm were identified by the prosecution as the key agents that ran the Pirate Bay, an internationally infamous hub of media piracy. The plaintiffs, Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal, were demanding two years in jail for each defendant, as well as up to $180,000 in fines.

The trial lasted for little over three weeks; however, for that short period the Stockholm criminal court became a representational microcosm of the larger changes occurring in industrialised, informational societies. As events unfolded in the courtroom, a group of journalists live-blogged and Twittered from an adjacent room, whilst others inside and outside the court translated the courtrooms live audio feed from Swedish into a multitude of other languages. Automated Twitterbots collected all tweets related to the trial marked by the posters with the tag #spectrial and distributed them as a central feed for anyone who wished to follow the debate in real time.