INTRODUCTION

As we saw in Chapter 1, the progress of digital technology in recent years has hastened legislators and commentators alike to suggest methods by which the electronic transmission of information and ideas might be monitored, some would say policed. We have already met arguments based on national security, morality and economics. This chapter explores the last two of these in relation to intellectual property rights on the Internet, and does so through an examination of the implications of the exercise of those rights for creative practices and in particular the legal and commercial threats to ‘social authorship’ (Toynbee 2001). Finally, it examines peer-to-peer file-sharing networks (such as Napster and Gnutella) from this perspective. It considers such practices as aspects of social creativity, not simply as intellectual property theft. Yet such practices have not emerged from nowhere. They are the outcome of at least three major intersections of cultural practice: the recent history of illicit reproduction of artists' performances by audiences (home taping and bootlegging) and the social networks that grew alongside these practices (tape swapping constitutes peer-to-peer (P2P) networks before the fact, as it were); the various movements (such as shareware, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, interventions such as open copyright and open publishing) that have developed on the Internet, but which also have pre-digital antecedents; and the history of creative appropriation across numerous artistic movements, including high art and the demotic (visual and aural collage, folk song, the many syntheses of popular music styles into ‘new’ genres).