John Logie’s new book, Peers, Piracy and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates, is now out from Parlor Press. I’m interested to see that the author and publisher have chosen to carry on Lessig’s publication model from Free Culture: the book is licensed under a Creative Commons license and available simultaneously in capitalist paperback and free PDF. Bravo. The difference, though, is in the combination of licenses: this one is Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs, which would preclude the audio book transformation project that worked so well for Free Culture.

That’s a small quibble, though. This work is a needful thing: the first book-length analysis of how we talk about peer-to-peer culture and how this talk shapes policy. One of the major problems in the copyfight has been the polarized rhetoric of the discussions, an issue that John’s treated before in A Copyright Cold War. Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion extends those comments productively. Here, John offers an examination of the metaphoric frames which cast the slant of the popular and juridical discussion on p2p: are we sharing or stealing? Are we engaging in dialogue or warfare?

Jessica Litman has also alluded to this issue in previous articles: see The Demonization of Piracy and Sharing and Stealing, among other pieces. Her work is, of course, from a legal perspective. I’ll be interested to see how John engages with her commentary.

Clancy’s proposed a group discussion of the book, and I’m definitely in. Who else is?