Napster, the music sharing software, turned everyone into a pirate. This happened while I was in college. I started a CD collection when I was in high school. When I stopped buying CDs, I had about 400 physical discs in various cases. Much like vinyl collectors, I could point to my physical copies and signal to others that I had a deep appreciation for music.

When Napster came along, I was able to find rare recordings that weren’t available in any music shop. I also felt like I had long supported artists by buying their CDs and that downloading music for free wasn’t putting anyone on the streets. For other people my age, this was the first time most of them had leech access. No phone lines to tie up. Laptops were rare. Why not just leave your desktop computer on and download everything. In less than a year, Napster had 80 million registered users. Sixty one percent of college campus network traffic was caused by Napster.

Peer to Peer, or P2P is a virtual network, established entirely independent from the physical network, thus it does not have to obey any administrative authorities or restrictions.Napster’s servers had a database of users and a list of files they had available. The actual mp3s were stored on users’ computers. So technically speaking, Napster wasn’t distributing pirated music. This is how P2P networks work. If you’ve used Bittorrent, you know that you need to find an index server that tells you where to get the files you want. That’s what Napster was.

P2P networks also do something incredible in terms of transferring data. If you go back to the idea of packet switching, data is just 1s and 0s. You can send things out of order, you just have to know how to reassemble them. When it comes to P2P, even if I haven’t finished downloading a song, I might have 20% of it. An index server knows which parts of the file I have. When I begin downloading a song, if it’s available on multiple machines, I can download from all of them at the same time. The software figures out the fastest way to put that file on my machine.

The legal challenges to Napster started with Metallica when they found a demo of their song circulating before it had been released. In 2000, A&M Records and other recording companies through the RIAA sued Napster on the grounds of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). When Sony and other music companies threatened lawsuits against universities for facilitating copyright violations, it became easier to argue for blocking the program from networks.

When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The music industry advocated for stopping piracy at all costs. They argued that musicians were losing money, which is a legitimate reason. But at what cost?

One tool the industry used was Digital Rights Management, or DRM. An mp3 with DRM couldn’t be transferred from one device to another without authorization. People were making mixtapes long before mp3s. By implementing DRM, this practice was outlawed for digital formats. Search for DRM and mp3 and you’ll likely find tools for removing it. DRM is a mere hindrance. For the tech savvy, piracy is still easy.

Music is one of the highest forms of art humanity has. To name a few, musicians like Run The Jewels, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead release their music for free. The power comes from the performer, the performance, the messages, and a deep emotional connection.

A copy of an mp3 costs nothing to reproduce. Any price put on it to treat as a digital good is completely artificial. The more we live our lives online, the more we will deal with the idea of artificial scarcity, or rather the scarcity of items that exist even though the technology for production or the sharing capacity exists to create a theoretically limitless abundance (or at least a greater quantity of production) than currently exists.

Who benefits the most from controlling music distribution?What is the cultural cost of disallowing people to share music?

The music industry illustrates a common response from corporations to new technologies: it must allow me to profit. If the music industry had their way, we would have ditched P2P and gone back to CDs. That not only would have affected the music industry and the cultural appreciation of music, but other industries as well.

If you’ve watched Silicon Valley on HBO, Richard starts Pied Piper as a compression algorithm. Less data transferred equates to a better internet. When they have to pivot, Richard imagines a new internet structure that is based on Peer to Peer technology.

Instead of central servers that connect to each other, everyone’s device becomes a part of a distributed network. There is a real version of this, as an experiment, called Netsukuku. It’s anonymous, censorship-free, and fully independent but not necessarily separated from the Internet. There is no central authority. What would the internet look like today if we radically reinvisioned it as a Peer to Peer network?

Corporations will always try to bend and create new laws to favor their bottom line. When it comes to technologies, there are corporations with diverging interests. This can be seen with Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers should treat all data equally and do not discriminate or charge differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment or method of communication.

What corporations are in favor of net neutrality? A big one is Netflix. Netflix is immensely popular and a bandwidth hog. They have created a piece of software that millions of people enjoy. They’re profitable. They want to stay that way.

Originally, telecommunications providers like AT&T were given local monopolies over phone lines. Maybe AT&T at the time cozied up to lawmakers to make this happen, but the reality at the time was that putting phone lines in the ground was expensive. There were also conflicting protocols. Multiple systems in the same ground was highly inefficient. By granting telecommunication providers a local monopoly, the government was also able to set conditions of service.

Today, those telecommunication providers also provide internet services. And cable service. And content. Look no further than NBC Universal Comcast. NBC was a broadcast TV station that merged with a production studio and theme park, and then merged with a cable and internet service provider. NBC Comcast does not support net neutrality. Without net neutrality, NBC could charge Netflix extra fees for using up bandwidth that Netflix subscribers use in order to access Netflix services. Can Netflix afford a pay hike? Maybe. Would a new Netflix type service be able to handle extra fees? Probably not.

Would Comcast rather you use their Xfinity On Demand service instead of Netflix? Probably. Advocates of Net Neutrality often refer to internet service providers as dumb pipes. It’s the concept of a dumb network, composed of dump pipes with little or no control of the way users make use of the network. In this system, operators of the dumb pipes would focus their efforts on making their pipes as fast and reliable as possible.

Traffic shaping is the control of computer network traffic to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency and increase usable bandwidth by delaying packets that meet certain criteria. In practice, shaping is often accomplished by throttling certain types of data, such as streaming videos or P2P file sharing.

Much of this conflict seems decided for now. FCC commissioner Ajit Patel reversed his predecessor’s course and undone regulations working towards Net Neutrality. Observing this debate has led others to propose radical new structures, such as free culture.

QuestionCopyright.org articulates Free Culture as such: there is a growing understanding among artists and audiences that people shouldn’t have to ask permission to copy, share, and use each other’s work; it is also a set of practices that make this philosophy work in the real world.

Free Culture was first proposed by Lawrence Lessig, a Professor at Harvard Law School. He’s a preeminent cyberlaw scholar and internet activist. He also briefly ran for President. In his book Free Culture, Lessig sees four major regulators: Law, Norms, Market, and Architecture, with each having a profound impact on society and whose implications must be considered. He argues that code displaces the balance in copyright law and doctrines such as fair use. When it becomes possible to license every aspect of use through code, no aspect of use would have the protection of fair use.

Lessig is also responsible for Creative Commons, an alternative to the “all rights reserved” copyright. It’s devoted to expanding the range of creative works available to others to build upon legally with an easy one page explanation of rights.

Copyright is a form of artificial scarcity on the internet when it’s used to disallow copying or disallowing access to sources. Some food for thought. Major media corporations have used legal action against college students for close to $100 billion dollars, because their improvements of search engines made it easier for people in a university intranet to find copyrighted music placed by others in a public folder.

MP3.com used to allow customers to upload an MP3 and let it be streamed on only computers that that customer had logged into. MP3.com’s lawyers said that the company had reasonable grounds to believe that this service was legal. They were sued and put out of business.

In 1998, the United States Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act which President Bill Clinton signed into law. The legislation extended copyright protections for twenty additional years, resulting in a total guaranteed copyright term of seventy years after a creator's death. The bill was heavily lobbied by music and film corporations like Disney, and dubbed as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

Lessig sees copyright as an obstacle to cultural production, knowledge sharing and technological innovation... and that private interests – as opposed to public good – determine law.

In 1999, Lessig challenged the Bono Act, taking the case to the US Supreme Court. Despite his firm belief in victory, citing the Constitution's plain language about "limited" copyright terms, Lessig only gained two dissenting votes: from Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens.

In 2018, new works finally entered the public domain… from 1923. Without the extension, we’d be seeing works from 1964 entering the public domain. Who controls culture? Who controls access to culture?

https://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html