When Oink Went to Piggy Heaven

Here's a wise post on why it is utterly pointless pursuing P2P services and their associated tracker aggregation sites:

What effect has this attack on tracker sites had? Well, to use the example of Oink, it has been entirely negative for the mafiaa. I didn't know what Oink was, as I had never heard of it, until it was busted. I now do know the names of the two successor sites now based on news reports of what happened after Oink went to piggy heaven. Should I ever care, I now know where to go for illegal torrents. I suspect there are several million more like me who were handed a roadmap by just about every IT news site out there, along with the news that absolutely zero people using the site were busted along with the ops. Can you say own goal?

Interestingly, what this comes down to is access to information: thanks to the Internet you and I have as much - often more - clue as to what's going on everywhere than the traditional news gatekeepers.

Some is Rotten in the State of Copyright

Nicely put:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).50 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

(Via Boing Boing.)

P2P'ers (Heart) CDs

Imagine:

A newly study commissioned by Industry Canada, which includes some of the most extensive surveying to date of the Canadian population on music purchasing habits, finds what many have long suspected (though CRIA has denied) - there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.

So tell me again why the music industry is pursuing the P2P crowd with such ferocity? Death wish, perhaps?

A Very British Takedown

Here's someone who will be looking for a new job, ultimately, I hope. But at least it sounds like he's a nice chap who deserves to get a good one when that day comes:

John Giacobbi, president of Web Sheriff, a British company that has protected music from such artists as Moby, The White Stripes and The Shins, said that not everyone in the sector takes such a hard-line approach to file sharing.

"We're trying to be more civil," Giacobbi said.

Spiffing, old chap, absolutely spiffing. And kudos.

Don't Mess With Our Thing

This litany of music industry woes is an object lesson in what happens if you fight the (Net) Family:

The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it's too late. "The record business is over," says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. "The labels have wonderful assets -- they just can't make any money off them." One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: "Here we have a business that's dying. There won't be any major labels pretty soon."

Amazingly, it could have all been so different:

Seven years ago, the music industry's top executives gathered for secret talks with Napster CEO Hank Barry. At a July 15th, 2000, meeting, the execs -- including the CEO of Universal's parent company, Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Sony Corp. head Nobuyuki Idei; and Bertelsmann chief Thomas Middelhof -- sat in a hotel in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Barry and told him that they wanted to strike licensing deals with Napster. "Mr. Idei started the meeting," recalls Barry, now a director in the law firm Howard Rice. "He was talking about how Napster was something the customers wanted."

So near and yet so far. (Via IP Democracy.)

AllPeers Goes OP2Pen

I can't help feeling that P2P is so, well, you know, dotcom 1.0. And I must confess that I've never had the slightest urge to use the AllPeers Firefox extension, even though it sounds cool enough:

when we set out to create our Drag-n-Share Firefox extension, we didn’t just take the most direct route to deploying the functionality we felt our users would want. We also built a powerful platform with features that could be used by many types of next-generation web applications: a generic resource framework, a scalable data store and of course a full-fledged peer-to-peer network. By baking the tricky bits into the browser platform, we hope that AllPeers will simplify the deployment of applications that work with structured data (like microformats), store this data where it makes the most sense (whether on the user’s machine or on a centralized server) and make real-time communication between users a snap.

But news that it has seen the light and is going open source is nonetheless highly welcome. It will be interesting to see how it develops as a result.

Getting it Right on Copyright in Europe

The European Union is commissioning some seriously serious research these days. Yesterday I wrote about the impressively named and indeed impressive "Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU"; and now here we have one entitled "The Recasting of Copyright & Related Rights for the Knowledge Economy".

I can't pretend to have read all 305 pages of it, but I did spot a couple of sections in the Executive Summary that suggests it has its heart (and head) in the right place:

Holders of neighbouring rights in performances and phonograms have expressed concern that the existing term of protection of 50 years puts them and the European creative industries, in particular the music industry, at a disadvantage, as compared to the longer protection provided for in the United States. Chapter 3 examines these concerns, first by describing and comparing the terms in the EU in the light of the existing international framework and existing terms in countries outside the EU, secondly by examining the rationales underlying related (neighbouring) rights protection and finally by applying economic analysis.

The authors of this study are not convinced by the arguments made in favour of a term extension. The term of protection currently laid down in the Term Directive (50 years from fixation or other triggering event) is already well above the minimum standard of the Rome Convention (20 years), and substantially longer than the terms that previously existed in many Member States. Stakeholders have based their claim mainly on a comparison with the law of the United States, where sound recordings are protected under copyright law for exceptionally long terms (life plus 70 years or, in case of works for hire, 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation). Perceived from an international perspective the American terms are anomalous and cannot serve as a legal justification for extending the terms of related rights in the EU.

This too was perceptive:

An assessment of the acceptance of copyright by the general public is more difficult to make. For this purpose empirical data on p2p file sharing and software sharing were analysed as ‘indicators by proxy’. These surveys make clear that unauthorised use and distribution is the norm for approximately 50 per cent of the populations concerned. However, a much larger share of the European public does recognise the equitability of and the need for copyright protection.

However, in such circles as student communities as well as the ‘virtual communities’ that are p2p networks, the prevailing ethical norm is not so much one of complying with copyright, but rather one of sharing. It was furthermore found that consumer behaviour is also informed by a weighing of the advantages and disadvantages of file sharing versus legally purchasing copies. If a commercial content provider offers the consumer a ‘bad bargain’ in terms of limited availability, high prices or restrictive use conditions (e.g. portability), then the consumer is not likely to find it unethical to opt for p2p file sharing instead.

Ode to an Expiring Blue Frog

I suppose every frog has its day, but I hope that this doesn't mean the end for Azureus as we know and love it:

Azureus, maker of the popular peer-to-peer client, has revamped its software to include video publishing and distribution tools with a much slicker and user-friendly interface. To support the new platform, called Zudeo, the company has raised a $12 million second round of funding.

This space is hot; BitTorrent last week said it had raised $20 million from Accel Partners and Doll Capital Management. Much like BitTorrent, Palo Alto-based Azureus incorporated, took venture money, and came up with a business model only after the massive success of its open source software.

After all, it's well known that bloat is bad for frogs and software.

A Framework for Web Science

That's the title: as dull as ditchwater. The abstract sounds machine-generated:

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

But since it comes from Sir Tim, it is, almost by definition, important. At least it's all available online.

Programs, Participation and People

One of the central themes of this blog is how the ideas at the heart of free software - collaborative, participatory, distributed development - are gradually seeping out into other areas, with dramatic effects. Mostly I write about the obvious examples - open access, open content, open genomics etc. - but occasionally I slip in instances popping up in areas that seem to have little to do with software and yet are obviously still highly germane.

An example is this report called People and Participation. It comes from the dubiously-named "Involve", which sounds like a front for some bunch of religious nutters, but as a page entitled "Connectivity" makes clear, it has some interesting ideas that, er, plug straight into the technological origins of these movements:

The 21st century is delivering endless opportunities to connect with one another wherever we are. The new technology that fills our pockets allows us 24/7 contact with friends, family and work; it is also central to Digital Britain, the second stage of the digital revolution that could transform the lives of everyone in the UK. But this new culture of connection is not limited to bluetooth and WiFi, connectivity also underpins the enabling state, the Government vision of a modern social contract.

(Via P2P Foundation.)

On the Commonality of the Commons

One of the central themes of this blog is that the opens - open source, open content, open genomics and the rest - share certain key characteristics, and thus form part of a broader movement, of great historical importance.

There's a fine articulation of just this viewpoint in another of Richard Poynder's splendid interviews. It's with Michel Bauwens, creator of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's a typical sample from the second part - it's a two parter:

We need to increase the scope of applications in which open and free principles are applied; we need to apply and experiment with peer governance, and learn from our mistakes; and, as I said earlier, we need to interconnect and learn from each other, in the understanding that all these efforts are related, and have a larger common purpose.

In addition, we have to defensively stop the destruction of the biosphere, and stop the new enclosures of the information commons we are witnessing. Instead, we need to be constructively building the new world, and in a way that ends and means are congruent with each other. If we do this then the P2P subsystem will continue to strengthen, and eventually reach a tipping point. At that juncture it will become the dominant model.

Obviously...Not

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has released its response to the British Library's Content Strategy. It's a wonderful demonstration that they don't really know what is going to hit them:

We believe that a shift towards the provision of online rather than physical access is appropriate. However, customer expectations of what is possible with online content are limited only by the capabilities of the technology, and not by realistic business considerations; at the extreme, every UK citizen might expect free online access, and unhindered re-use, at home or at work to everything in the Library’s collection, which would obviously destroy the market for publishers.

Obviously. Not.

Saying that online access will "obviously" destroy the market for publishers is akin to saying - as was said - that television will obviously kill the cinema, that the cinema will obviously kill the theatre etc. etc. Those who are the gatekeepers of older technologies always fear new ones that will reduce their powers. But what happens is that new technologies tend to create new opportunities even for the older ones they appear to threaten - at least to those who are open-minded enough.

Two classic examples: MP3s have created a huge demand for songs that are no longer in the catalogues, and P2P networks are full of videos of old television shows. Think how much money they owners of these materials could make if they decided to satisfy this demand themselves, instead of trying to stifle it.

It's the same with books. Providing online versions does not kill the need for books; indeed, it is likely to encourage people to buy more, for one very simple reason. The text that you read online is not the text you read in a book, even though the characters are similar: it lacks the physical experience of bookness. It is that - not the text - that book publishers are ultimately selling.

"Obviously", judging by the comments above, and by many others elsewhere, it's going to take a long hard battle to din this idea into the heads of those in the publishing industry. (Via Open Access News.)

"Pirates" Redeeming 'Pirates'

I'm not keen on the term 'pirates' when applied to people who copy content; its one of those blatant attempts to pre-empt the debate by adopting a deliberately loaded terminology (rather like the idea of a 'war on terror'). My view is that pirates - the real ones - were a murderous and contemptible crew whose crimes are not even remotely comparable to those who transgress one-sided and disproportionate copyright laws, and therefore the two should never be associated.

But maybe I will need to re-visit my position. Although the reality behind pirates has not changed, the public perception probably has. And that's largely thanks to two films: Pirates of the Caribbean I and II. As a result of Johnny Depp's lovable rogue, equating those who infringe on copyright with pirates might actually make the former seem rather more admirable.

But there is something else interesting going on here. "Pirates", the film, is one of the most successful in recent times; and yet, as these figures show, it is also one of the most copied/'pirated' on the P2P networks. As noted by TechDirt, this goes to show in the most dramatic way possible, that

despite what movie execs say, their films can "compete with free" -- and do pretty well. Whether it's offering something more convenient, offering moviegoers a better experience, or using free content as a jumping-off point to sell people other stuff, there's lots of ways movie studios and theaters can thrive in the face of file-sharing. But to do that, they've got to own up to the obvious, and quit blaming piracy instead of changing how they do business.

P2P Pence

A clever idea: using P2P networks to connect borrowers and lenders, spreading the costs and risks across a distributed, people-based banking pool. What's interesting, of course, is that if this ever took off it would reduce the power of established banks - and the financial system based on them - considerably. There are, though, clearly lots of risks and uncertainties in the approach which may stifle its growth.

Two companies are mentioned in the article: Zopa, which is British, and Prosper, which is American. (Via Slashdot.)