An excellent issue again, WT - thanks for keeping us Napsterites so well informed!
The story on Lawrence Lessig's book was interesting and highly relevant to us p2p activists:
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Published the same week that Microsoft released its controversial Windows XP operating system, "The Future of Ideas" is a timely cautionary tale about how best to understand such inter-related phenomena as Napster's fall, Time Warner's merger with AOL, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the proprietary games cable and wireless companies are playing as high-speed Internet service providers. The Internet, Lessig reminds us, was originally designed to be an intellectual "commons," a free public space open equally to all (see, for example, the mission statement of the World Wide Web Consortium). But in recent years corporate heavyweights have begun using copyright and patent law to turn large swathes of the Internet into their own private property. Code is kept secret; content is restricted. Increasingly, ideas are not free; increasingly, the fact that they are being regulated is invisible; increasingly, we are not free - to make use of the innovations of others or to innovate ourselves.
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In contrast to Lessing's manifesto it was also interesting to read
AOL's Richard Parsons's reflections on new technology:
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He flagged interactive TV and video on demand as areas of development. He then quickly described enemies the industry "dare not ignore:" digital piracy and technologies that strip advertising out of content.
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The freedom from advertising was one of the core elements of what became known as 'Napster experience'. There we had a wonderfully interesting zone of virtual interaction with huge amount of content and virtually no commercial 'noise' spoiling the quality of experience. With later p2p services (and web services in general) it has become increasingly clear that this is exactly what the 'consumers' want. Aggressive advertising that intercepts our surfing and other online activities is simply a nuisance that nobody but the advertising companies and their customers seem to want. Faced with this challenge the advertisers have resorted to spyware/adware technology that they are symbolically trying to push down our throats and the consumer reaction is even more negative.
Does this mean that the consumers are not interested in new products, new artists, new content? No. They are just increasingly fed up with hype and intrusive technology that is being forced on them. There is a lesson here to be learned for the advertisers but it may take some time and struggling until they get it. Just like in real world, there is a need and justification for commercial services and places in cyberspace. It's great to have sites like Amazon from where you can order books to anywhere in the world when you need to. I don't need any aggressive popups to find my way there as my occasional need for new books is a real one. But an overcommercialized cyberspace with no privacy and no free public space for social interactions is a disgusting, suffocating idea. We don't want to spend all our days in malls even if it nice to go shopping now and then. If we go to a club or a restaurant to have good time we don't want to have a salesman sitting in our table and stealing the attention that belongs to our friends. A healthy cyberspace would be mostly private and uncommercial in nature, the commercial services being easily available when - and only when - we are interested in them. P2P holds a promise to provide pleasurable and interesting non-commercial areas for online interaction but as we have seen the commercial pressures to squeeze this free space away from us are strong indeed.
- tg
