Ryan Nelson - Synthesis Essay

BUSA 692 Synthesis Paper – Peer to Peer

Ryan Nelson

I think that the innovation with most potential for influencing musical culture and industry in the near future is the same innovation which has most profoundly influenced music in the recent past: peer-to-peer architectures. Peer-to-peer technologies and ideologies are already recognized for having deeply affected music business models; I feel the full-implications of this innovation are still to be seen.

When I talk about Peer-to-Peer as an innovation I am not exclusively thinking about P2P downloading, such as Shawn Fanning's Napster, which so directly confounded business models based on record sales in the last decade. Nor am I exclusively thinking in terms of traditional networking jargon, where peer-to-peer architecture is simply a means of distributing packets in a computer network, where the only competing approach is a client-server architecture. Nor am I thinking of it exclusively as a sort of ideology, characterized by promising organizations like the P2PU (which is creating an online community based university using open education resources) or open source software teams which call their organizational models peer-to-peer, contrasting traditional hierarchical organizational structures. The Innovation of Peer-to-Peer that I discuss embodies all of these concepts. It is not restricted to describing data, but might apply to commercial transactions, democratic systems, organizational structures and more. Though the term is no older than computer networking and only came into common usage in the late nineties, the concepts it describes are as old as history.

We started the course with Lyn Heyward's presentation on the Spark. “Lyn and the Cirque,” concluded Professor Lank at the end of the talk, “had sparked a wildfire, which is now raging completely out of control.” I feel the fiery metaphor for creativity was an appropriate way to begin the course and captures some of the essence how ideas disseminate from peer to peer. As Lyn describes, in participating in a performance the viewer is made part of the performance and the performance part of the viewer. They become keen to share it because it is now a part of them. As if incendiary, a good idea catches, friends tell friends about it, people share it, other artists emulate it, and soon all the world is ablaze. Lyn and Prof Lank are not the only ones to think in these terms. To Thomas Jefferson:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”[1]

In peer-to-peer networks, creativity (such as that sparked by the magic of Cirque) spreads like Jefferson's fire, wildly and free, without central authorities mitigating and filtering the content. The result is typically lawless, occasionally brilliant, and often in conflict with copyright.

The two copyright experts who came to speak as guests in class, Laura Murray and John Gomery, seem to feel that the “moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition” component of peer-to-peer file sharing does not yet redeem it of the copyright complications it creates. I was surprised to hear the honourable justice use the terms peer-to-peer downloading and piracy as if they were interchangeable on two occasions in his talk. Considering the huge amount of legitimate file-sharing dependent on peer-to-peer protocols, particularly among open source software communities, I hope that our copyright policy makers are as familiar with the technological situation as the computer nerds writing about them on Boing Boing and Slashdot. Gomery's response to Geneviève's question did not encourage us that this was the case.

Laura Murray, whose voice on copyright reform I greatly admire, was also unwilling to defend those who most vocally defy copyright today, whether through peer to peer downloading or through remix art. While much of her criticism of RIP was fair – yes, challenging copyright remains a predominately male pastime, plagued by the unfortunate vulgarities associated with most male-dominated pastimes; yes, open source cinema is not the product of everyone but rather an extremely limited few, just like Wikipedia; yes, Gaylor fails to teach the differences between US and Canadian copyright traditions; and yes, Gaylor may well have flown to China with National Film Board money just to meet his hero lawyer – I don't think the criticisms were damning. They felt more like a professor's comments on how to improve an A+ piece of work than reasons to dismiss a whole project. Perhaps I defend RIP because it had such a keen affect on me, first introducing me to Girl Talk. Before Girl Talk my capacity to appreciate popular rap, hip hop, and dance music was always handicapped by my general cynicism about culture fed through a one-way plastic consumer machine, which Lessig would describe as read-only culture. By putting this previously read-only culture in a headlock and pouring beer on its head, Girl Talk made it accessible to me; I was allowed to hear the underlying music where before I would fixate only on the disgruntling message manifest in the medium. Though I wouldn't describe Girl Talk's remix as exceptional music – much in the same way that throwing tea from a sailboat, or making salt from the sea might not be exceptional spectacles – the symbol is one of terrific empowerment. The consumer culture imposed on us, the MTV generation, has become ours, to speak with as well as listen to.

Laurence Lessig frequently describes three periods of read-write culture which I would also describe as great periods peer to peer knowledge transfer.[2] The first was upon improvements in European printing which led to a flurry of self-published pamphleteers and a reading public hungry for new and unorthodox ideas. The technology turned all of Europe into one Agora, and the enlightenment which followed was very much the product of an escape from the traditional modes of thinking dictated by church and state, which I argue can be seen as a client-server style relationship. A second enabling technology, radio broadcasting, produced a similar explosion of unmitigated expression, with thousands of amateur radio stations spontaneously arising to broadcast about nearly anything. But this phenomenon was short-lived; regulation of the air waves followed quickly. We are currently in the midst of a third such period, where the internet has let bloggers arise in the spirit of the pamphleteers, let podcasts arise in the spirit of the ad hoc radio broadcasters, and let nearly anyone share their music with the world.

In music we have so far seen peer-to-peer downloading flourish on the internet; we have seen peer-to-peer musical instruction flourish on Youtube where you can find lessons on virtually any instrument known to man; and we have seen peer-to-peer collaboration in new music on sites like ccmixter.org; but, we have yet to see a rise of any significant peer-to-peer commerce to replace the remuneration schemes which peer-to-peer filesharing has partly disrupted. In the past century both the dissemination and payment mechanisms for accessing music involved a central authority – the producer. Today the authority has been significantly challenged in terms of distribution by peer-to-peer file sharing without any similar challenge to centralized basis of remuneration. There have been attempts: the student presentations throughout the course have brought our attention to ventures like Sell-a-Band and Kickstarter; students from previous years have discussed their version of a micro-payment systems; I have recently become enamoured with Flatr, a micro-patronage system designed by the creators of the Pirate Bay which is very close to the kind of project I hoped to design for our class; and Nithum has just launched an exciting advertising and digital currency project called Empire Avenue which has potential to reshape virtual economies, greatly simplifying electronic commerce. Yet we still have not seen the implementation of what Richard Stallman started calling for in the nineties: a simple button in the media player that would donate a dollar to an artist.[3]
I am convinced that enabling peer-to-peer commerce to occur with the same ease and safety of peer-to-peer downloading will have profound and constructive effects on the business and culture of music. I hope that it happens soon, because, as international regulatory legislation like ACTA come nearer to completion, and as cloud computing continues to grow into what Donald Talton thinks is the only thing that will save the traditional record company and what Sandy Pearlman and Bryson consider to be a threatening terror to freedom, the regulatory landscape of the internet is going to change. The explosion of popular sharing of ideas which has been the consequence of peer-to-peer innovations and which caused Time Magazine to name You the person of the year in 2006, may yet be vulnerable. To Lessig, the great public participation in the marketplace of ideas which burst forth in the early days of radio and print was eventually throttled by regulation from traditional and newly founded centres of power. Today, as censorship rages in Australia and families are barred from the internet in France, the forces of digital regulation may well bring about a similar throttling. One of the main arguments in favour of this regulation is the RIAA statistic we encountered on the first day of class, that piracy costs 12.5 billion in losses each year, leaving poor artists destitute and unappreciated. Great peer-to-peer innovations in sharing data sparked this phenomenon; I hope that great peer-to-peer innovations in sharing wealth will ensure that it is viewed as a constructive event, taking us closer to a new enlightenment rather than justifying an era of restrictive control.

[1] From Jefferson's letter to Isaac McPherson, quoted in Boyle, J. (2008). The public domain: Enclosing the commons of the mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.

[2] Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: Penguin Press.

[3] Stallman, R. (2001). Copyright vs Community in the age of computer networks. TECHNOLOGY AND HEALTH CARE. 9, 304.