Is the online piracy and free content everywhere killing our culture? Robert Levine 's polemic is entertaining, but doesn' t quite convince Evgeny Morozov

If Andrew Keen 's The Cult of the Amateur: How today 's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and assaulting our economy appeared in 2007 was the subtitle of music to many ears. Short on facts and long on hyperbole, it was not 't very convincing, but then the growing concern that elite culture was the vulgar ephemera puts the capitulation and tweets had internet bashing in something of a cult itself.

In Free RideRobert Levine, a one-time editor of Billboard Magazine, makes a much stronger case for an impending cultural apocalypse. And while he occasionally ventured into the field Andrew Keen - "isn 't creative destruction, it' s destruction of creativity" - he also knows his statistics.

According to Levine, was the Web of the culture industry by surprise. Technology companies that were on the other side better prepared, using the chaos of laws favorable to lobby. Levine singles from America 's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes sites like YouTube don' t in front of the screen have any uploaded video for possible copyright violations. Real problems began when services like Napster threatened to many business models by allowing users to swap files. Worse still, a formidable intellectual lobby - attempting to streamline these activities under the "free culture" on banner - led by law professors such as Larry Lessig and funded by Silicon Valley.

Levine is not just a "free culture" people. He argues that celebrated faddish ideas from Internet gurus - for example, that newspapers should give away their content online - based on sloppy business. "For media companies, expert advice on technology was like letting the fox run a strategic management retreat in the hen house," he writes.

Levine is an engaging, provocative writer, and there is too much like Free Ride . His fundamental insight that Silicon Valley 's penchant for experimentation inadvertently violated the cultural industry, is correct. His materialistic - almost Marxist - Declaration of "free culture" ideology as the product of Silicon Valley 's hidden agenda is also very refreshing.

However, Levine 's penchant for the conspiratorial - all eventually leads to Google! - A distraction that sometimes makes him sound like right-wing channel is Glenn Beck. Probably he would bring an action on this reviewer - a fellow at the New America Foundation and Stanford University, both of which take quite a beating in Free Ride - How shilling for Google. (Sorry, I'm still a Christmas card from Eric Schmidt to receive.)

While it's true that Google has been aggressively shaping Internet policy, this doesn '\ t mean that their interests are indistinguishable from those of the public. To take an obvious example, Google finance the work on Internet censorship deal with - the more people surf the Internet, the better it is for Google. Is it useful to coordinate these efforts on the grounds that Google has to attack a commercial program?

When assembling his passionate attack on Silicon Valley, Levine often distorts the arguments of his opponents. I've yet to meet anyone who professes the theory that "should be the price of each good's marginal cost \ fall" to meet. Levine believes that Wired 'S Chris Anderson wrote just that in his 2009 book Free . But he didn't: Anderson was writing about firms selling homogeneous and undifferentiated products, not songs or movies. (Anderson: "If one product is vastly superior to another. the primary determinant of price is not marginal cost but 'marginal utility' - what it's worth to you.")

Or take a recent study by the Knight Foundation, which is financed by Levine blasted for taking the simplistic view that universal broadband access \ to many journalism 's solve problems. Exactly what the Knight study in five of his 10 recommendations said - the evil, according to Levine, should be addressed by creating more quality content.

While Levine acknowledges the dark nature of most studies on piracy, you paint the studies he relied on a more ambiguous picture, as he can. He advertises for a 2010 report shows that a quarter of all Web traffic piracy related-is, but he fails to mention that the report also found that films that are bought and legally could have online far less frequently pirated . Therefore, his claim that "traditional media companies aren 't get into trouble because they' re not the consumers what they want" does not ring true.

Levine's call to arms - "it's time to ask, seriously, whether the culture business as we know it can survive the digital age" - betrays a poor grasp of media history. Had our laws been crafted to preserve the "culture business as we know it", the photograph, the gramophone, the photocopier, the tape recorder and, yes, the internet may have never arrived.

In a chapter subtitled "How could kill the Internet Mad Men "Levine worries about the future of cable television, seemingly unaware of the fact that, in the 1960s, American broadcast networks do their best to obliterate the nascent cable industry, which survives only thanks to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Had the judge Levine 's follow the conservative logic would be a fitting subtitle "As the networks interrupted their parents Mad Men ".

Are new technologies really as much of a threat to the culture industry? Google TV - one of the projects Levine lists are among the biggest threats to cable TV - seems dead on arrival, at the moment exceeds the number of sales returns. According to a recent survey of BookStats, in 2011 the publishing industry earns nearly 6% more sales than in 2008, while the sale of 4% and more books - thanks in part to ebooks. The global march of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify piracy has less attractive.

None of this suggests Levine, who, complaining that the Internet does not promote innovation. "Like TV, the Internet is only as good as what 's on", he writes. Statements such as these underscore the risk of setting Internet policy on the basis of the interests of the content industry alone. For those in this group, the only Internet TV is on steroids - its impact on the Arab Spring, economic and human development and the future of learning be damned.

However, it is irresponsible to effective Internet policy, without examining, as there are areas that have nothing to do with culture impacts on trade. Do we really want to build tools to make online content for copyright infringement screen, only to discover that the very dictators tools for spying on dissidents?

Levine 's proposed solutions are not new. He wants to rewrite or reinterpret laws that shield Internet companies from responsibility for the actions of its users and pass new laws for both publishers and consumers of pirated materials to punish. All these proposals are likely to trigger unintended consequences - increased monitoring, stalled innovation and disruption of the Internet architecture - that Levine would rather not go into detail.

Despite these shortcomings, Free Rideis still an entertaining read, entertaining with a cast. For how often you get to James Murdoch is one - whom Levine places among the "Savior of Journalism" - demanding "an enforcement agenda that works and doesn 't turn a blind eye to theft"?

Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion (Allen Lane)