Technological Sharing, The MP3 Rebellion

With the advances of Internet networking to what we now call broadband, and innovations in the creation of electronic music files called MP3s, there suddenly developed along with the concept of the mass sharing of music through the Internet. People could query servers to find the machines of people who had converted their CDs into MP3 files and who made them available for sharing. Those downloading files would in turn would share their new files. Quickly the music industry complained and after various lawsuits over a period of a few years, the companies offering the query services where shut down. But, just as that was happening, a new distributed technology was created where there where no central servers providing information as the location of music to share. The is the Gnutella network, written with code created by e-mutualists in the public domain. Now, instead of using commercial servers to locate the songs, people’s machines relayed location information to each other in a more random matrix. There was no longer a commercial target for the music industry to focus on, only millions upon millions of Internet users. For a while it appeared that the majority of broadband users where engaged in this file sharing legally defined as piracy by industry lobbyists and politicians.

There were a few lawsuits but the likelihood of being sued by the music industry was even less than that of being struck by lightening. Eventually the music industry relented by allowing listeners to download individual songs legally, for a dollar each, rather than being forced to buy CDs, which are expensive, inefficient with respect to space and contain second-rate filler songs most listeners don't want to hear.

This small rebellion by such a large portion the people from wealthy nations was remarkable in many ways. It showed that a “Robin Hood” mentality exists with many people. The record industry, represented by examples of waste and hedonism such as scenes of rap stars dumping thousands of dollars of champagne on the floor to display their wealth could no longer hold the high moral ground. Possibly more important, this new Gnutella network represents a computer paradigm that is truly open, where all the different represented nodes of computers work with each other in total trust and, most important, there is no central controlling computer system or network. It is truly democratic and it benignly forced the controllers of the music to meet their needs for face tremendous losses.

Still more uses may come from the Gnutella network, it will very likely help independent artists to get a start in conjunction with web related promotions and fan networking. Also music historians can share access to rare and obscure recordings bringing back important examples of music that would otherwise be forgotten. Social networking would help enhance the computer networks effectiveness.

Moving away from the benefits of sharing music, a concept of sharing “computer abilities”, where the very code that runs the computers can be provided by neighboring computers. In combination with networking breakthroughs and more efficient code design, this distributed form of sharing would keep every computer up to date. Smaller devices, such as the "wearables", whose storage is limited, could throw away less used code and replace it with recently accessed code, and then throw away that code and get other code, giving them unlimited capabilities despite their small size and limited resources.