In the creation of the internet — originally developed by the government as a military communication device — the designers modeled it after the interstate highway system in the United States. The reason for this was that the highways had been designed to withstand attack — so that even if a given road were out, coast to coast transportation would still be possible. Taking this as it’s mode, the actual make up of the internet has changed only slightly, into a what is known as a multi-tiered network, where multiple points on the network connect to a central point, and a number of those central points connect to an even more central point, and so on and so forth, until we have series of interconnected hubs at the center. This model is not a centralized one, where a hub at the center routes the information, nor is it a truly decentralized network, where all the nodes are directly connected to each other.

Working within this apparatus, communities have developed that mimic this decentralized model. One of the first to have emerged is the open source movement, which in practice has been around since the 1960s, although, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation notes that, “the sharing of recipes is as old as cooking.” At this time, most software had accessible source code — the computer code framework from which computer programs are made — which was often distributed on printed paper, and was entered by had by the user. The idea of proprietary software was a foreign concept, as the commonly held belief at that time was that knowledge and information are not commodities or proprietary, thusly they should, and can, be freely distributed — that restricting the flow of information through proprietary restrictions in turn inhibits the intellectual and educational growth of the given community. Working with these concepts in mind, researchers with access to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) used a process called Request for Comments to develop telecommunication network protocols. This collaborative process led to the birth of the Internet in 1969.

By the 1970s, companies had moved into the landscape, and began to dominate the software by hiring away scientists from educational institutions, and producing closed source software—some of which had a Nondisclosure Agreement as part of the conditions to using the software. Many disagreed with these moves out of practical and moral concerns, chief among them MIT researcher Richard Stallman, who in 1984 founded the Free Software Group (FSF) to distribute free software under the General Public License (GPL) or “copyleft.” The FSF states that:

“Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. “²

The FSF began providing a free replacement of the dominant operating system, UNIX, named GNU, which stands for “GNU is Not UNIX” and today the FSF/UNESCO free software directory has over 5,000 individual free pieces of software available for users.

The aim of the GPL is to prevent cooperatively developed software from being turned into propriety software by putting in place a system of unique licenses on the software. Users can run, copy and modify the program through the source code and distribute modified copies to others. What they cannot do however, is add more restrictions of your own, and future versions have to be under the GPL also. This is seen as the viral nature of the GPL. In practice, this allows GPL’d software to be used and modified freely with the key restriction that the user cannot restrict the freedom of others to do what they want with the software.

What the GPL does on a more fundamental level is a shift in the function of property in a new political economy. As Steven Weber notes, “The conventional notion of property is built around variations of a simple claim, the right to exclude you from using something that ‘belongs’ to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute not the right to exclude.” ³ This is a dramatic shift away from the function of private property under capitalism, where, as Marx observes, “…labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property.” ⁴ That is, that private property is the right of an individual to exclude others use of an object— the essential quality of property being the denial of that property to others. The shift in the open source movement is that it inverts the exclusionary nature of privately held ownership, to that of collectively shared — if individually produced — knowledge to be shared. “The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities” (Marx) and this freeing up, through the redefinition of property, is “the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy.” (FSF)

In the spirit of the GPL, the Creative Commons (CC) project was launched by cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, renowned documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, noted Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, and public domain web publisher Eric Eldred. Aimed at creative mediums—such as film, photography, music, writing and websites—CC uses a system of licenses to allow creators more control over their works than traditional copyright. Unlike copyright, CC has different options, such as the choice of allowing derivative works to be made from the licensed work, whether to require attribution, or if the licensed or derivative work can be used for commercial purposes. The stated goal of CC is to “offer creators a best-of- both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare ‘some rights reserved.’”⁵ In this way, CC is more akin to the original intent of copyright — that being encouraging and fostering development and creative input of creators — rather than the bastardized web of copyright and intellectual property laws that we have now, which are more aligned towards protecting the financial investment of the license holder.

Practically speaking, the way that open source software is developed now is through groups of individuals who choose to participate, who may be geographically separate, but are able to communicate by way of the internet in what is described as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Michel Bauwens describes P2P as a process which:

…produce[s] use-value through the free cooperation of producers who have access to distributed capital: this is the P2P production mode, a ‘third mode of production’ different from for-profit or public production by state-owned enterprises. Its product is not exchange value for a market, but use-value for a community of users. [P2P processes] are governed by the community of producers themselves, and not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy: this is the P2P governance mode, or ‘third mode of governance.’ [P2P processes also] make use-value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes. This is its distribution or ‘peer property mode’: a ‘third mode of ownership,’ different from private property or public (state) property. ⁶

Or, put more succinctly, P2P is “’relational dynamic at work in distributed network’. As such it can apply to a network of computers, as in filesharing, where all sharers put their computers together so that each can have access to each other’s music, but also, and this is more important, to a network of people.”⁷ The individuals who make up these groups collectively collaborate on these projects, for varying reasons — be it a belief in open source software, reputation, or a need for the particular software. They are not located in a specific local, but are spread across the globe. The organization of the projects varies from project to project, so that one project may have a leader, such as with the Linux project with Linus Torvalds — which was originally based out of Norway — or a committee, such as with the Apache project. While the make up of the organization differs from project to project, one key feature is the modular design of the software, where instead of designing singular, monolithic pieces of software — that are prone to total failure if one part fails — individuals work instead on modular, single purpose programs that come together to make a whole. This not only works well with the make up of the open source model, but is a more efficient software model. As Weber notes, this model, as well as the licensing creating the right to distribute, not exclude, “…has enabled a production process that in analogous to the end-to-end architecture of the Internet. It builds a technological and social commons that drives participation to it and appears to generate a level of distributed innovation that at least on the face of evidence from market share can be more rapid and more efficient than innovation that is incentivized within traditional proprietary software firms.” ⁸ The fruits of this participation can be seen in projects such as the Firefox browser, Wikipedia, and a large part of the internet’s infrastructure, with a majority of website using a LAMP installation.

While the open source movement provides us with an example of the myriad benevolent possibilities of P2P, one element of P2P that has been cast in less than positive light recently has been the distribution of music and video files on these networks. One of the first, and largest, examples to emerge into the public consciousness was Napster — a music sharing network — in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The rise of this network was due in part to the convergence of two factors: the first being a new compression for audio files into a smaller size, enabling the files to be transfered faster, without significantly effecting the quality, called mp3 (or MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, designed by the Motion Picture Expert Group). The second factor was the rise in high speed connections, primarily within college campuses and dorms, where individuals who had either never had internet access before, or only had low dial-up connections previously, now had a broadband connection. Napster collected a large number of of users — 26.4 million at it’s peak in February 2001⁹ — in one central place, excited about the music, and the ability to share their favorite tracks, find new music or discover rare, unreleased or obscure tracks — all outside of any promotional campaigning by the record labels. The service allowed connected users to search for, and directly download whole music files from other connected users.

This enthusiasm in Napster can be seen not just as passion for music — although that was a large part of it — but as a rejection of the major record labels. To many, the major record labels — which at the time were Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music, BMG Music and Universal Music Group — were the gatekeepers of culture, and many had become dissatisfied with what they were offering, as evidence by the rise in independent music throughout the 80′s and 90′s. Resentment towards the record labels also manifested in a antritrust suit brought by 41 states against the major labels, as well three of the largest retailers in the US — Musicland Stores, Trans World Entertainment and Tower Records — charging them with more than a decade of price fixing. The FTC estimated that at the time of filing, consumers had overpaid almost $480 million since 1997 in artificially high CD prices¹⁰. The playing field was ripe for individuals to seek an alternative to labels who produced a lowest-common-denominator product that many people were not interested in, convinced people that they were crucial — when in fact they were anything but — and were overcharging their audience for the whole experience.

There were signs at this point too that this new distribution model had potential, such as Radiohead Kid A debut at number 1 on Billboards Top 200 list in 200 after tracks from the album had been leaked onto Napster three months earlier — an incredible feat considering the album was deemed “challenging” by the label and consequently was going up against acts with much larger marketing campaigns and budgets than their own, and the fact that the band had failed to break the top 20 with their last three albums. Wilco is another case in point, when their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was rejected by their label, AOL Time Warner imprint Reprise, because it was not seen to be commercially viable. The band was let go of it’s contract, and given the rights to the album. At the same time the songs were leaked onto the internet, and the album became a hit. Almost immediately bids starting coming in from labels, and Wilco signed with Nonesuch records, another AOL Time Warner imprint, who released the album. It has since been certified Gold, was named The Village Voice’s Album of the Year, and Q Magazine’s 100th Greatest Album Ever¹¹ .

What happened next has come to shape the current landscape. Instead of working with the fans, the labels — and notably the rock band Metallica — chose instead to take an antagonistic stand against Napster. Rather than harnessing that enthusiasm, several record labels — including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)— sued Napster, starting in 2000. This antagonism furthered the resentment felt by fans, who were feeling alienated and persecuted by the labels, especially after the service was forced to shut down in 2001 after loosing those cases.

By that point however, the bell had been rung, and those individuals who had experienced what the technology was capable of allowing them to do, and the community built up around it, did not simply disappear. They realized that through sharing and copying, that the original copy was not diminished — that the use of the digital work in this way was non-rivalrous — and so other file sharing networks sprang up in Napster’s place in a hydra-like fashion. Services like Grokster, Limewire and Kazaa were quick to take Napster’s place, but were equally quick in attracting the same legal action against them that had brought down Napster.

While these services, being as they are companies with a public face, have been targets the for the RIAA, what has been harder to target is the protocol of P2P. This is the genie that has been let out of the bottle. The Napster model of direct transfer of information between two users has been replaced, with the most popular new protocol being bittorrenting. With this protocol, a user shares a file, and users that are interested in the file download parts of it, while simultaneously sharing parts of what they have with other interested parties. There is no need for a central computer facilitating downloads, such as with the Napster model, and is a much more efficient P2P model, with users simultaneously consuming and sharing. Additionally with this model, there is no company, necessarily, for the RIAA to go after. This has led to an increase of lawsuits filed by the RIAA against individual users — 30,000 by some counts¹² — using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to acquire the name and address of users from internet providers. The legality of these lawsuits has yet to be tested in a court of law, as the labels are eager to settle out of court with the defendants — many of whom are college students and parents. Yet, these lawsuits have left individuals undeterred in their use of P2P networks, with use of P2P networks growing with each year¹³.  A 2006 survey of high school students found that 79% of the students procured their music online, with 72% of those students using P2P networks to do so¹⁴.

While the legality of such trading is in question, what is clear is that this distribution is affecting the model on which the music industry works. The previous model, in which artists were fiscally compensated through record sales — a model already in peril with artists receiving a very small percentage of money after the label, producer, agent, lawyer and everyone else takes their cut¹⁵ — is shifting. Music, and the internet, is beginning to be seen as a promotional tool, to propel the sale of concert tickets, merchandise, ringtones and commercial placement. Look at the departure of such big ticket acts such as Jay-Z and Madonna from their record labels, and signing with concert promoter LiveNation. Ringtones, for their part, generated $510 million in retail sales in 2008¹⁶. And the success of Moby’s licensing of every track off of his 1999 album Play for commercial use, as well as the licensing of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon for a Volkswagen commercial in 2000, has ushered in a time when licensing music for commercials, television or movies has become nearly ubiquitous and quite lucrative in their own right. In terms of promotion, P2P networks are also proving to be a powerful force, such as in 2005 when OK Go’s video for their track A Million Ways became a viral hit on the user-generated video site YouTube; it launched the band into prominence and the album saw a 182% jump in sales a year after it’s release ¹⁷.

While this may be seen as new mechanisms by which the labels are able to generate new revenue, what is happening is that these are reinvention of the tools of the industry, tools by which individuals are able to take up to bypass the stranglehold that the labels have had on the industry. With these tools, artists are able to strike out on their own, without major label support, and find relative success in their music. In part, this has to do with the vanquishing of the image of the major labels as necessary in the first place. While in the past, when the cost of a promotional campaign in addition printing and packaging the physical media was prohibitive to anyone but a small corporation, this was true. However, with this new model, the need of artists for the major label is in crisis.

Earlier this year marked a significant milestone, when iTunes, which doesn’t require a record label in order to distribute music on the site, surpassed Wal-Mart to become the largest music retailer in the US¹⁸. With the popularity of services such as iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic, bands such as Nine Inch Nail and Radiohead have been able to abandon their record labels, and instead self released their most recent albums, with positive results: Radiohead has sold 3 million units of it’s last album, In Rainbows, including digital and CD sales in the year since it’s release¹⁹ and the first week sales from Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I-IV totaled $1.6 million for the band²⁰.  With In Rainbows, Radiohead experimented with a limited pay-what-you-want (including free) digital download of the album before announcing the physical release. That experiment brought in more revenue for the band during those three months than all sales combined for it’s last album, Hail to the Thief²¹ and the album debuted at number one in the US and UK when it was released on CD²². Nine Inch Nails for it’s part has departed from the major labels and self released two of it’s last albums, Ghosts I-IV and The Slip, under Creative Commons licenses — which means that fans are free to download the tracks and use them as they wish, such as sampling or remixing. While Ghosts I-IV was offered as either a free or $5 download, The Slip, the band’s latest album, was released for free, in advance of a successful worldwide stadium headline tour.

While much of this is centered around finances, what is fundamentally happening is a move away from the major labels as central arbiter of taste. Through alternate routes of distribution artists are able to now have more direct contact with their audience. The audience is also, for it’s part, able to exercise more power over what is what is seen as popular. Music that might have otherwise been seen as not commercially viable is instead picked up by these P2P networks and given another life outside of the mainstream ecosystem. The dynamic has changed from the labels handing down the acts from which to choose from, to the audience having the power to say what it is that they want.

This shift of power is not just being seen within the music industry but also within the television and movie industry. As broadband has become more and more ubiquitous within residential homes, and as compression algorithms and distribution programs become more refined, movies and television shows have become more as easily shared as their smaller musical counterparts. The television and movie industry have had the advantage, however, of learning from the music industry, as technological limitations have all but recently disallowed the vast propagation of large video files on P2P networks. Seeing that users have the desire to watch their content, the industries have been working to find models which allow users to do such, but which works with the studio’s licensing.

Television has had to not only deal with the rise in P2P networks, but also in home recording, with popularity of digital video records (DVRs), most notably TiVo. DVRs allow users to schedule recordings of shows, with negligible loss in quality, and play back at their convenience. They have become so popular, that even cable providers such as Comcast are offering them. Users have also created an open source DVR, MythTV, to create a low cost, high quality alternative. For the content providers, these DVRs, as well as the P2P networks that almost immediately show up on, allow users to watch the shows, but also allow them to skip the commercials — which the most often do — that fund the creation of the show. This has created an impetus for the studios to keep the audience that is there, while generating revenue.

To do such, the studios have started distributing their shows in channels other than than television. The largest boom has been in DVD sales of television series, which has seen a growth in sales, even while overall DVD sales are down²³ . Such sales have been able to affect studio decisions, such as Fox’s decision in 2004 to bring back the show Family Guy after the cancelled show became the number one selling DVD in 2003²⁴. Additionally, studios have been licensing their shows for download on services such as iTunes, which allows users to purchase episodes at a small price. They have also set up partnerships with Hulu.com and Joost — both of which host television and movies — to stream ad-supported content to users for free, in addition to addition to ad-supported streaming on the studio’s parent site.

The movie studios have not had to deal so much with the DVRs, but they have with the old “sneakernet” P2P network of bootlegging, which has only become more of an issue to them of late, aided as it is by P2P. This has motived them to create new channels of distribution that will drive down the desire for bootlegging. One such model is the recent deal with Netflix, the DVD rental website, who recently signed licensing deals with studios to allow a watch-on-demand service for it’s subscribers. The service allows it’s members to watch a large number of movies and television shows in it’s catalog at home, on either their computer, or on their television through a set-top box. Apple has also introduced a set-top box that will allow people who have either purchased or rented movies from the iTunes store to play them on their home theater at their convenience.

These new models challenge the previous dynamic of the studios dictating the when and where content would be seen has brought about “time shifting” — the allowance of a medium to be viewed at a time convenient to the audience. The first challenge to this was VHS and Betamax in the late 1970s and 80s, which allows individuals to make, purchase or rent home recordings of movies or television shows. However, the exponential ease and speed of transmission of digital and P2P networks over those media have necessitated the remaking of the distribution models. Already, there is in place a grassroots distribution network on P2P networks for the translation of television shows, so that users can download their favorite shows, in their native language, anywhere in the world almost immediately after it’s aired²⁵.

Like we saw with the music industry, the remaking of the industry is not simply a power play for existing entities to keep their power, but a scramble to vie for relevance in a field that may not need them. In a time when media is increasingly consumed in some digital fashion, the old guard is having to compete with user-generated independent content on YouTube, Vimeo.com, iTunes as well as personal sites. Artists wanting to reach a wide audience are no longer required to get the blessing of major studios in order to do so, and the studios and major labels know this and are trying desperately to keep their place.

Perhaps what we are seeing is that the paid licensing model on which the old guard was based on is not functional in this new paradigm — that the open source movement’s licensing model of “right to distribute” is more apt to this digital environment. Gone is model in which scarcity begat value — scarcity based on physical media used to transport and play back music, or television shows shown at a certain time — because now, with digital reproduction and distribution, that scarcity is gone. So that to try to assess value based on scarcity, and align distribution along lines of rights of exclusion is not only wrongheaded but goes against the internet and P2P’s basic design of the redundant, disseminated distribution of information. A basic reassessment of the value of the content is needed at this point if any meaningful progress is to be made.

In the mean time, the these modes of distribution as well as the dropping cost of digital production — made even lower through the work of the open source movement, with free versions of video, audio and image editing software — has seen a rise in the role of user-as-producer. In this scenario, the audience is not only consuming information, but is actively participating in it’s creation. We are seeing this play out in social networking sites such as YouTube, Flickr — which has done much to spread the

popularity of CC by making it one of it default licenses — Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Yelp.com, deviantArt, threadless.com and countless others. Users are acting as nodes, taking in and giving back, a stark contrast to the passive consumption on which broadcast model, and the television, movie and music industry, was centered around. It is precisely this role of the user-as-producer that Bauwens points to when he describes the “difference between a decentralized network, where power is split into a number of large pieces, and where the network is characterized by obligatory hubs; and a true distributed network, where the “agent”, human or computer, is free to undertake his relationships. In the latter we have a bottom-up process without coercion, and this is really what we understand under peer to peer.”²⁶

What we are seeing is not a local phenomenon, nor a strictly Western one. The participants in P2P are global, with active participation within South America, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. It is a fundamental shift of production — an off-centering of cultural production. This is the production model that Hall speaks of when he describes “ the West [as] an absolutely pivotal, powerful, hegemonic force, but…no longer the only force within which creative energies, cultural flows and new ideas can be concerted.”²⁷

-December, 2008

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

¹ Hall, Stewart. “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History.” Modernity and Difference. London: INIVA, 2001

² Free Software Foundation What is free software and why is it so important for society? http://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

³ Weber, Steven The Political Economy of Open Source Software and Why it Matters, Princeton University Press, 2005

⁴ Marx, Karl Private Property and Communism, 1884

⁵ Creative Commons About Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/about/

⁶ CTTheory.net The Political Economy of Peer Production http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499

⁷ A Thousand Tomorrows Interview – Michel Bauwens – A P2P Future http://www.pantopicon.be/blog/2006/11/10/interview-michel-bauwens-a-p2p-future/

⁸ Weber, 204 – 205

⁹ ComScore. Global Napster Usage Plummets, But New File-Sharing Alternatives Gaining Ground, Reports Jupiter Media Metrix http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?id=249

¹⁰ USAToday. States settle CD price-fixing case http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-09-30-cd-settlement_x.htm

¹¹ Wikipedia Yankee Hotel Foxtrot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Hotel_Foxtrot

¹² Electronic Frontier Foundation. RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later http://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-years-later

¹³ ibid.

¹⁴ ibid.

¹⁵ Negativland The Problem With Music by Steve Albini http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

¹⁶ BMI Ringback Tones Lead Mobile Music Market Growth in 08 http://www.bmi.com/news/entry/536285

¹⁷ USAToday Blend of old, new media launched OK Go http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-11-27-ok-go_x.htm

¹⁸ Los Angeles Times. Top music sellerâ€TMs store has no door http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/04/business/fi-itunes4

¹⁹ Boston Globe. Radiohead crunches the numbers: Three million “Rainbows” sold http://www.boston.com/ae/music/blog/2008/10/radiohead_crunc.html

²⁰ The New York Times. Sales for Nine Inch Nails http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/arts/14arts-SALESFORNINE_BRF.html

²¹ ibid.

²² Music Ally. Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pot of gold http://musically.com/blog/2008/10/15/exclusive-warner-chappell-reveals-radioheads-in-rainbows-pot-of-gold/

²³ The New York Times. What to Watch? How About a ‘Simpsons’ Episode From 1999? http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/business/media/24dvd.html

²⁴ USAToday. ‘Family Guy’ un-canceled, thanks to DVD sales success http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2004-03-24-family-guy_x.htm

²⁵ Wired. Lost, in Translation: The Internet’s Subtitle Underground http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_torrent

²⁶ Bauwens, A Thousand Tomorrows.

²⁷ Hall, 2001.

I guess the purpose of this site is to give forum to my longer form writing.  It’s something that I enjoy doing, and since graduating college, I haven’t had a chance to do as often as I would like.  So I made this site in the hopes of getting back into the routine of longer form, essay style writing.

And off we go!