Music and Cyberliberties

Music and Cyberliberties. By Patrick Burkart. Middletown, CT. Wesleyan University Press, 2010. 200pp (paperback). Notes, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-8195-6918-9. $24.95 Not far from the borders of the electronic frontier where the next disruptive technology threatens to turn the communications world inside out again, the Wild, Wild West of the World Wide Web finds the sheriff of Digital City and his deputies struggling mightily to keep law and order in the territories of Intellectual Property (IP). Armed with battalions of attorneys, thousands of cease-and-desist notices, and a deep-seated desire to put the fear of god into anyone who even contemplates an illegal download, these upholders of the rights of 'them-that-own' are making fitful progress of a sort. Just this past summer, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) prevailed upon Google to change its search algorithms to lower the rankings of sites for which Google has received large numbers of copyright removal notices. Google's YouTube had already significantly stepped up its policing of copyright infringement. But earlier in the year, two bills aimed at slowing online piracy Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), bit the dust after Congress faced an unprecedented online firestorm of constituent protest fueled by Internet giants Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others. The battle over control of online IP is evolving so rapidly as to date Patrick Burkart's Music and Cyberliberties. It does not in any way date the central argument or importance of his book. Burkart seeks to illuminate the "social conflict between property interests of concentrated media and telecom firms, on one hand, and musicians, fans and a broad swath of social groups organized around music, on the other." (p.19) The Texas A&M University associate professor provides a concise history of cyberliberty movements and trends leading up to the so-called Napster Watershed, a July 2001 legal defeat for unencumbered file-sharing (then at its zenith) which Burkart calls, "a pivotal moment in the history of the Internet, affecting everyday life for millions of people globally ... P2P [peer-to-peer] users who continued to share music became, juridically, copyright criminals." (p.85) Burkart neglects to note that among the earliest litigants taking on Napster was Metallica. The heavy metal band's work was appearing on the free file-sharing system even before its commercial release. But surely the author is right to point out the seismic split on cyberliberties within the creative community between a very small number of musicians now signed to major labels and the majority of artists who are not. The author cites the Pew Internet and American Life Project's "Artists, Musicians and the Internet" report from 2004 in which two-thirds of the artists surveyed saw the threat of peer-to-peer file-sharing as negligible or even no threat at all. (p.72) An overwhelming majority of them said it had actually increased their exposure and helped them make money. …