Why Pirates (Still) Won't Behave: Regulating P2P in the Decade after Napster

Abstract:     
Since the birth of Napster in 1999, corporate copyright owners have attempted to "govern" file sharing aggressively at three discrete points of intervention: the content level, the network level, and the user level. Their efforts have met with resistance at each of these points, however, because they have failed to appreciate the insight articulated by Michel Foucault that governing people, in the broad sense, is not only a matter of making them behave; it's also a matter of making them want to behave. This article surveys a decade's worth of anti-piracy regulation and examines the ways in which the entertainment industry's recourse to coercion at every point of intervention has functioned to undermine rather than advance the anti-piracy cause.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 47

Keywords: copyright, file sharing, peer to peer, piracy, P2P

JEL Classification: K19, K39, K42, L82, O34

Accepted Paper Series