Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks

The media debate surrounding music downloading has reached a point of unproductive polarisation. Much of the commentary from peer-to-peer companies on one hand, and from the music industry on the other, has been highly customised rhetoric. This rhetoric commonly uses a discourse of ‘us versus them’ as the limited frame of reference: industry versus pirates, or legitimate practices versus illegitimate practices. Such claims deny the complexity of both the music-sharing phenomenon and the copyright developments related to it, effectively obscuring any legal, philosophical and technical intricacies and masking the networked interrelationships between the production and consumption of creative works. This paper seeks to move beyond these oppositional terms to consider the emerging ‘technological ecologies’ of peer-to-peer networks, the role of encryption, copyright recontextualisation and the ‘mash-up’, and the emergence of what media theorist Bernard Schütze calls ‘remix culture’.