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The Internet | Technology

One of the most contradictory aspects of the incessant attempts to legislate against pornography both on the web and elsewhere (and there are many such aspects, of course) is the inability of the idiot moralizers to grasp a very simple fact about the history of capitalism's technologies. That's to say, it's pretty clear that every communicational technology developed under capitalism (film, photography, the telephone, computers, the mass press, and so on) has historically come to realize its potential by way of its more prurient uses. And as we've seen with the web, this is a necessary prelude to the realization of the commercial functions of those technologies. By and large the moralizers just want to jump from the first stage to the desired second stage, without acknowledging the necessity of the first. -- Paul Smith
Some interesting sites on the online audio and the music industry:
  • http://research.microsoft.com/crypto/openbox.asp Microsoft, which loses billions in revenue to software piracy every year, feels the record industry’s pain.
  • http://www.eff.org/Intellectual_property/Audio/free_music.article
  • http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html
    2002, feb 18; 23:02:
  • Peer-to-Peer : Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies - Andy Oram [1Book, Amazon US]
    2002, feb 27; 11:02:
  • Sonic Boom -- John Alderman [1Book, Amazon US]
    Napster may or may not be a factor in the music scene of the future, but its extraordinary rise--and the attention it focused on the MP3 digital audio format--has ensured its status as a key figure in bringing this new type of sound recording to public consciousness. Sonic Boom, by veteran cyberjournalist John Alderman, cogently recounts the brief but tumultuous story that led up to this upstart song-trading exchange attracting 500,000 users each night--along with the wrath of the traditional recording industry.

    Peer-to-peer raises the possibility for people interested in a topic to create their own language for talking about it. While different communities may all share an underlying infrastructure, like Jabber's chat service or Gnutella file sharing, the structure of the users' data can emerge directly from the users.

    Metadata, which describes each file and the elements within it, holds the key to self-organization. XML is a good foundation -- but only a foundation, because it just offers a syntax. Building on the XML foundation, schemas hold some promise for structuring both content and users' reactions to the content. One slogan we considered was, "Publish my taste, not just my music files." http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/09/22/p2psummit.html

  • http://www.musicbrainz.org MusicBrainz is the second generation incarnation of the CD Index. This server is designed to enable Audio CD and MP3/Vorbis players to download metadata about the music they are playing. All of the data collected on this server is made available to the public under the OpenContent license.