“P2P does not stand for ‘permission to pilfer.” ~ Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft
The year is 2005, Broadband has started to finally reach a saturation point.
In early 2004 an important milestone was reached, over 100,000,000 subscribers globally are wired through broadband access but as this includes residential and business subscriptions, the actual amount of end users is estimated to be 250 million with a projected growth of 300 million at the end of 2004.
Source:Emarketer Broadband Reports
The internet has evolved from a messaging system for Darpanet and then university mainframes doing military research and communication, to a bustling community where free thinking and exchange of ideas takes place on a daily basis. Though the technical beast while a marvel, is now experiencing conflict between the corporations intent on regulating the flow of information over the super information highway and the mass of users who believe that regulation will render it nothing more than another propaganda tool and consumer window for profit.
In this article we will look at the history of file trading and p2p as it relates to the rise of faster connections and the arrival of broadband in an attempt to truly understand, Did P2P and Broadband kill the media star?
Needs of the Government
Before we cover the scene today its important to look behind and get a picture of the humble beginnings of the internet and how it became the boogey man of the standard information channels and various trade groups. In the beginning during the 50’s America watched as the Russians launched sputnik and test their first hydrogen bomb. While the U.S was the first nation to build functioning Nuclear Weapons it disturbed the Government that their cold war foes had such capability and it was the launch into space that bred fears of a nuclear strike from space.
The United States Government therefore commissioned the creation of an organization called the “Advanced Research Projects Agency” or ARPA for short.
In 1962 (the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis), the United States Air Force and ARPA began research and development in response to the Russian advances in space and nuclear technology. It became obvious that in the event of a nuclear war, the United States would need a Command and Control system that could survive one or more nuclear blasts. Work began on researching a decentralized system that would be robust enough to survive and function even if most of the network were destroyed. The contract for development went to a company called RAND Corporation, Paul Baran of Rand Corporation first conceived the idea for a distributed, packet switching network, built on the premise that communication on the network would be unreliable after a nuclear strike could wipe out huge sections of it. Paul figured out that by breaking messages up into pieces and sending them via various redundant paths to the destination, messages would be difficult to destroy, and hard to intercept. A system with no centralized control point would be difficult to target, let alone destroy.
The result was a network that could still deliver communications even if the network was crippled and mass loss of data occurred.
Expansion
As the deployment of the network grew and included various Government Institutions and Universities the Defense Department took over project Arpa, renaming it to Darpanet (Defense Advanced Research Projects Network). The Defense Dept. then administered the network for a few years until it had grown beyond the Governments desire to sponsor it. Over half of the entities connected were Public universities, In ‘71 Ray Tomlinson, originally of BBN, wrote an application to send electronic mail back and forth and later modified it to use the @ symbol as in (user@host)
Before long 75% of network traffic was private and personal email between researchers in various educational institutions. At this point in the mid 70’s the Defense Department connections were dismantled and Administration was turned over to the NSF(National Science Foundation) and the rest is history, as computers shrunk and with the introduction of the personal computers in the early 80’s the stage was set.
The PC and Swapping Revolution
In the mid 80’s BBS became the mode of communication for the small user base that made up the internet at that point, at first simple software was traded on BBS mainly on boards such as Iniquity and Eternity and then this trade migrated to Warez sites and Internet relay chat and eventually encompassed Gamez as well as Warez.
By the mid 90’s the AOL Warez scene was also in full swing, spawning popular Warez figures such as “Da Chronic” a 17 year old high school student from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He created many programs for the scene one being AoHell a simple program that allowed everyone and the Holy Mary create fake accounts on Aol using random information and had built in Macros the most popular of which was the “scrolling middle finger you could “email bomb” or “IM bomb” people. The true intent was to be disruptive and in this aspect Da Chronic was successful.
The cat snuck in the window one night
The Warez scene flourished and then the trading of MP3s became popular to the masses for the first time, mp3 search engines popped up and websites that if you could download and install their proprietary software you could search their site for the material (i.e. Scour Media Agent) these were decent times with exception to the occasional dead link until it all changed in mid ‘99 when a sleep deprived college student named Shawn Fanning unleashed the cat on us all.
Changing the face of the internet: A new hope
Fanning’s product was Napster, a simple to use central program that allowed users to swap mp3 files with each other with the click of the mouse, made even better as broadband was starting to reach the breaking point in subscription and usage. It used a central server to store the information on millions of mp3 libraries held by the members of the Napster service and it was the first move in a tug of war between the trade industry and what was once an underground movement. What changed almost overnight were the base users, instead of sleep deprived Teens and University and College students, the people using the software turned into the everyday, people of all walks in life were using programs like Napster and Scour, what had been a hobby was now a full blown culture and a big headache for big music.
“From day one our fight has always been to protect the rights of artists who chose not to have their music exploited without consent. The court’s decision validates this right and confirms that Napster was wrong in taking not only Metallica’s music, but other artists who do not want to be a part of the Napster system and exploiting it without their approval. We are delighted that the Court has upheld the rights of all artists to protect and control their creative efforts. The 9th Circuit Court has confirmed that musicians, songwriters, filmmakers, authors, visual artists and other members of the creative community are entitled to the same copyright protections online that they traditionally been afforded off-line.”
~Metallica Feb 12, 2001
The Audio Empire Strikes Back
“We love the idea of using technology to build artist communities, but that’s not what Napster is all about. Napster is about facilitating piracy, and trying to build a business on the backs of artists and copyright owners”
~Cary Sherman, President of and back then senior V.P of the Recording Industry Association of America
In December of 1999 the R.I.A.A launched a lawsuit backed by rock band Metallica seeking the shutdown of the Napster network, these lawsuits actually increased popularity of Napster in it’s final days bringing in over 15 million users. This then brought into focus development for a successor, if Napster were to be shut down it would be a blow to the many users who built a community around the program. (more on this later) after a couple of injunctions to block copyrighted music (barriers the users found their way around) Napster finally folded in 2003 when it’s sale to Bertelsmann parent company of E.M.I was blocked in court.
In the end Napster was sold to Roxio for pennies and converted to a pay per use service and it has never captured the popularity it once had.
A Sack Full of Gnuts
March 14, 2000 Nullsoft released Gnutella as a potential successor of Napster to the public but withdrew it support but not a day later over concerns of copyright infringement but by this time programmers had already started to pull apart the code and create their own clients and it became GNU licensed and open sourced. This allowed the network to grow in popularity. In late 2001, the Gnutella client LimeWire, which had driven much of the protocol’s development, was released as open source. In February, 2002, Morpheus, a commercial file sharing group, abandoned its FastTrack (Kazaa) based peer-to-peer software and released a new client based on the open source Gnutella client Gnucleus.
Gnutella has since gained a respectable following and continues to encourage innovative clients.
Fast Forward
In subsequent years other programs also popped up such as Bittorrent and Edonkey2000, expanding the breadth and availability of content available for download, In late 2004 and early 2005 the entertainment industry struck hard when the Motion Picture Association America started suing websites distributing links to copyrighted material, sites associated with BT and ED2k. While initially slowing down the passing of copyright between P2P users ultimately their popularity has kept them afloat in these troubled times.
The Start of a Movement
The last couple of years as P2P has proliferated across the globe, trends are starting to show up, for the first time news stories are being broke open through the trading of media online including the abuses in Iraq of Iraqi detainees in prisons run by the U.S Pentagon.
Bloggers now often show the grim reality of the tragedies that are prettied up by the western media propaganda machine across the face of the globe.
Its known that on Gnutella people unwittingly share sensitive information potentially spreading their private lives across the planet to those savvy enough to search. This has worried Corporations who fear the uninhibited use of P2P would lead to the leaking of trade secrets. As a result there is a push for the regulation of technology, especially P2P and items that have been deemed “infringing” in their uses. This is all hiding a deeper meaning behind this drive for regulation.
It was not expected at the time of it’s conception that the internet would become the information horse it has become, especially that the explosion of broadband and that it would redefine traditional media and empower it’s users to jump boundaries and steer a course through the mainstream that has in the past been fed to us with the expectation that we swallow it as fact without questioning the information for ourselves. While the regulatory bodies try to shape the net into another form of control they have already failed as they have acted too late, Until the late 90’s the internet was considered a “grey” area in terms of legal boundaries and what was allowed. Now countries are forming Cyber Police squads to patrol the net looking for the disorderly.
In the next 10-15 years as Corporations try to regulate the way the internet is used by subverting technologies and new ideas through force, money and lawsuits the current P2P Hobbyists of today will slowly change in nature as information in it’s unadulterated form becomes the dominant material traded between peers. These Soldiers of Knowledge will be the front line in the approaching all out information war and become an important front for the truth even as the risk of prosecution and punishment become more severe.
Conclusion
It is important to educate yourself, schools fail as a system of control in the modern day as the factory settings they were made to emulate are outdated and as a result Governments and institutions have turned increasingly to technology to program and control the masses.
The fight over movies and music and indeed media itself is just the start of a bigger picture and in the face of the coming assault of our freedoms we are Soldiers of Knowledge, every one of us all.
The Future Approaches………..
By: Bryan M. (Moneoa)
~Lead Zeropaid News Administrator
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