Online File Sharing

Innovations in Media Consumption

Jonas Andersson Schwarz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135010560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Soziale Aspekte in der Informatik

It is apparent that file sharing on the Internet has become an emerging norm of media consumption—especially among young people. This book provides a critical perspective on this phenomenon, exploring issues related to file sharing, downloading, peer-to-peer networks, "piracy, " and (not least) policy issues regarding these practices. Andersson Schwartz critically engages with the justificatory discourses of the actual file-sharers, taking Sweden as a geographic focus. By focusing on the example of Sweden—home to both The Pirate Bay and Spotify—he provides a unique insight into a mentality that drives both innovation and deviance and accommodates sharing in both its unadulterated and its compliant, business-friendly forms.

1 Introduction

People don’t even know we’re a company. They think we’re two teenagers in a basement in Sweden.

(Matt Mason, Executive Director of Marketing, BitTorrent, Inc., in Wortham 2012)

The aim of this book is to make for a deeper critical perspective on the current phenomenon of mass-scale file sharing on the Internet. By focusing on the example of Sweden—home to both outlaw file-sharing site The Pirate Bay (TPB) and sanctioned corporate streaming service Spotify—insights will be offered into both infrastructure and the ways personal inclination is premised on a general disposition that follows from the collective experience of such infrastructures. “Sharing” has become one of the most telling pastimes of our digital, networked age. However, as digital literacy involves both innovation and deviance, it accommodates sharing and copying in rather divergent ways: Today sharing is manifested in ways that are both uncontrollable and unyielding, as well as compliant and business friendly. One of the things that this book will show is how these two modes of sharing are related.

Peer-to-peer-based (p2p-based) file sharing has been a mainstay of popular culture since the turn of the century, as well as the subsequent debacles around applications such as Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa. It should be noted that corporate attempts at harnessing the rapid spread of MP3 technology was only later captured in innovations such as the iTunes Store in 2003, Spotify in 2008, and a vast range of other services such as Rdio, Wimp, Grooveshark, and Soundcloud that will not be discussed in this book. Since the emergence of BitTorrent in 2001, online file sharing no longer entails only music files, but movies, software, and e-books alike. The phenomenon has been an integral part of online life for more than a decade, and from my own and other researchers’ findings it is apparent that unregulated file sharing has become an emerging norm—if not even a new condition to media consumption—especially among young people. In countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and South Korea, access to high-speed broadband is commonplace, and the file sharers who I have interviewed and surveyed, and who speak out on various online forums, hold that file sharing is as natural an element online, as trees would be in the forest.

My own approach has been to critically engage with the justificatory discourses of the actual file sharers, taking Sweden as a geographic focus, and to interview file sharers from other countries as well, at the same time following the mediated debates closely, both in Sweden and abroad. What my research has aimed to show is how file sharers justify their own media use in the face of the activity’s portrayal as a deviation from the conventional acquisition of media content. Further, a strong trust was noted among my respondents, in that unmitigated copying after all would have positive side effects that are, on the whole, beneficial to society. The potential downsides of file sharing were either avoided or met with counterarguments, but only occasionally denigrated—in fact, most of the file sharers who I interviewed offered coherent answers in defense of their behavior.

Where as this book will elaborate on debates that are largely international in character, and conclusions will be made that have general application, the example of Sweden will be illuminating also for international readers. In the last five years, Sweden has been home to both illegal operations such as the infamous Pirate Bay website and to well-known thriving business start-ups—such as Spotify—which utilize online sharing in rather different ways. What is less well known, however, is that the engineers behind Spotify honed their skills by crafting pure-play file-sharing applications (μtorrent) and that the Swedish founder of the voice and messaging service Skype, Niklas Zennström, similarly began his career in 2001 by founding Kazaa, a file-sharing program based on p2p technology, which in May 2003 was the world’s most downloaded software application.

This, in turn, makes for a potentially much wider discussion, as Sweden is an ideal case study on tendencies that have—for the last decade or more— been apparent throughout the developed world but are significantly strong in this country: individualization, increasing digital access and literacy, a typically modern inclination to efficacy, and a general trust in the state as an overarching system. Further, by having invested more heavily in broadband connectivity, countries such as Sweden and South Korea have had infrastructural conditions that have benefited mass-scale file sharing in more decisive ways than the United States or the United Kingdom.

Put simply, during the last decade, the unrestricted duplication of digitized media content between autonomous end-nodes on the Internet has become an extremely popular pastime—largely involving music, film, games, and other media copied without the permission of the copyright holders. The arguments put forward in this book are not that file sharing should be seen as a phenomenon that is a priori opposed to the current, neoliberal, capitalist world order. Rather, more often than not, it hinges on the individual end user’s desire to acquire entertainment and to maximize both pleasure and efficiency. As Giarin, Nuccio, and Montagnani (2012) have noted, convenience and gratuity lies at the heart of consumer behavior, both in the legal and illegal modes of online consumption. Although illegal services enable a lot of nonmainstream material to be exchanged, most of the material circulating in the BitTorrent ecosystem is not necessarily alternative or independent material. Further, such “alternative” content tends to consist of copyrighted, commercial products of the cultural industries, albeit with more narrow target audiences or commercial potential. Although the argument has been made—most successfully by Anderson (2006)—that the Internet makes possible a long tail of obscure or alternative content, it should be noted that, from a civic point of view, there would be nothing inherently different from file sharing as a mode of acquisition than legally sanctioned alternatives. Nevertheless, in allowing for this consumer agency to come about—in aggregated, not entirely foreseeable ways—file sharing has dislodged certain established industries (most conspicuously, the sales of audio CDs) while creating potentials for entirely new ones. At the same time, file sharing is being harnessed in ways that act as opposition to various centers of established, institutional order, while potentially reinforcing other forms of power and domination.

Using the recent years’ developments in Sweden as a case study, in which notable actors in the file-sharing economy have surfaced, this book will thus critically expound on contemporary debates around copyright and digital infrastructure. Making a clear overview of the area while at the same time connecting the subject to political philosophy, this book is intended to appeal to both undergraduate students and more erudite readers. Among the many things that I would like to argue for in this book is the peculiar resilience of file sharing in the face of legal suppression. Several observations attest to this—not only the various statistical indications that p2p-based file sharing has continued to grow during this last decade when looking at sheer volumes of data (p2p traffic still remains high, having become surpassed by real-time streaming video only in later years), but also when inquiring about the justificatory attitudes and opinions of file sharers themselves, as a growing subfield of new media studies has begun mapping this cognitive landscape.

This is, to all intents and purposes, a new book: Only around a third of it is based on my PhD thesis (Andersson 2010). As for my own approach, it is not my intention to revisit those debates on intellectual property rights (IPR) regulation and opposition that have already been covered by others such as Lessig (1999; 2002; 2004), Vaidhyanathan (2001; 2004), and Benkler (2006). Also Burkart (2010) and David (2010) center their narratives around the legal “tug of war” over file sharing in the United States. Although some legal context is given as it is important, my book is less of an enumeration of copyright laws than it is a “media anthropology” of file sharing, similar to that of Coleman (2012), Kelty (2008), and Söderberg (2011) on open-source/hacker communities. It does not comprehensively map or explore cyberliberties activism such as that of Dmytri Kleiner’s Telekommunism or Michel Bauwens’ P2P Foundation, nor is it a book about piracy in third-world countries; a (currently under-researched) field that has been explored by for example Sundaram (2009), Karaganis (2011), Liang (2005), and Pang (2006). The methods employed are less ethnographic than they are discursive. I focus not only on the ways argumentation is constituted—the justificatory motives and rationales among file sharers as a particular form of media audience—but also on the political economy enabling this sharing and forming obstacles to it.

It does not strive to romanticize activism; on the contrary, I am interested in precisely those modes of media consumption that do not presuppose an activist viewpoint. Moreover, I am inclined to use the term consumer as well as content when talking about culture. Many commentators, such as Fleischer (2008b), have argued against these terms—on good grounds, as such concepts are partially unsettled by file sharing. But given the proportions regarding degrees of user activity—very few upload and arguably even fewer contribute by creating their own professional content—the consumer-producer diagram is still often justified. Regarding the argument that “with copying, nothing disappears,” and that cultural goods are used but not “used up” in the same way as other goods—nor are gardens, buildings, or furniture, but we can still talk about consumer markets of such things. In fact, some cultural goods can be said to be used up at the act of consumption, for example, those films that are only viewed once.

It really is a book about ethical management in an era of networked accumulation. By this I primarily refer to a Foucauldian understanding of how the self is managed. As this is a self whose agency is amplified by technology—to the degree that ordinary consumers also become (unwittingly or not) occasional activists, partial producers of structures that, in turn, effectuate a dissent toward the ruling establishment—an understanding of a self-reflexive, reactive management of the self can also be read as a template for voluntary regulation in an era marked by individual freedom and empowerment.

It is a work of media structuralism, of injecting the burgeoning field of media ecology with a more system-centric approach. It is also an account that tries to maintain an awareness of the deeply paradoxical nature of agency in this current era of media consumption, as citizens are not only consumers but equally co-producers and co-distributors, becoming occasional activists—while this is, nevertheless, only a partial performance enacted in those brief instances when their agency is in fact restricted by the particular infrastructural setup of the system (being required to upload while they are downloading). For this reason, and the earlier reference to ethical management, the book should be of interest to policymakers who seek more progressive approaches to squaring civic needs and desires with organizational equity.

Lastly, it is also a piece of contemporary history, outlining interesting aspects of the weird and wonderful stories about Piratbyrån and TPB, alongside the equally amazing story of Spotify.

1.1 Social Ontology and Norms

Much has already been written about copyright, piracy, file sharing, and the legal regimes pertaining to these things. However, not all of this is written in hindsight, and even less is grounded in philosophical analysis of the standpoints and arguments involved. Hence, the perspective adopted here will be inspired by Nissenbaum (2004) and her references to social ontology.

Nissenbaum argues that the conception of hacking has changed over time: an “ontological transformation of hackers from heroes to hooligans” (2004: 211). For her, the very nature of a social role is contextually defined, and since the technocultural context shifted throughout the last third of the twentieth century, so has the image of what constitutes a hacker.

Hacking is now imbued with a normative meaning whose core refers to harmful and menacing acts, and as a result it is virtually impossible to speak of, let alone identify, the hackers that engage in activities of significant social value.

(Nissenbaum 2004: 213)

In the manner that hackers have been characterized as “sociopaths, thieves, opportunists, trespassers, vandals, peeping toms, and terrorists” (Nissenbaum 2004: 204), so have file sharers. These normative terms that our language is full of have relevance not only to the discursive analysis of metaphor and law (see Larsson 2011; 2012c; 2013; Larsson & Hydén 2010) but for the reflexive ways in which file sharers understand themselves as well (Andersson Schwarz & Larsson 2013). Much of the intervention that activist groups such as Piratbyrån has enacted has been to recapture language such as this; instead of speaking of downloading, these activists made a point of talking about a more reciprocal file sharing, instead of theft they spoke of sharing, and so on.

Social ontology (Searle 1995) is defined by conventions, practices, and institutions of social life; sets of rules differently codified—some of them hard-coded, such as the protocols and applications of the Internet, and some of them soft-coded, such as norms and conventions. I would, however, argue that Searle puts too much emphasis on the social aspect of ontology. Much more suitably for our area at hand, Latour (1993; 2005) has showed that the line between the human and the nonhuman aspects of agency is hard to draw, especially when it comes to phenomena that are so characterized by technical mediation and aggregated structural complexity. Searle emphasizes “collective intentionality,” but I would just as well emphasize “collectives by design”; the weight engendered through the system setup. Ontology is never really only social; however, the prefix is nevertheless useful to signify material configurations that have effects on the social world, and vice versa.

Halbert (1997) hypothesizes that the shift in the public evaluation of hackers is the result of a conscious movement by mainstream voices of governmental and private authority to demonize and portray hackers as abnormal, deviant bullies. She also mentions Ross’s (1991) interpretation that because hackers expose and threaten the resilience of infrastructure, mainstream culture links the hacker counterculture with sickness and disease.

The shift toward the depicting hackers as harmful could also be attributed to the greater shift in governance toward neoliberal economic policy and, later, neoconservative security policy in which exploits that lack obvious economic motivation are suspect and exploits that directly threaten social order are seen as acts of terrorism. It could equally be attributed to the normalization of those infrastructures that, ironically, were originally built through hacker exploits. Nissenbaum explains how narratives of transcending frontiers and homesteading in the infosphere were superseded by a narrative of normalization, as a second enclosure movement was enacted: “Private property leached into and became central to all the multiple layerings of the online world” (2004: 201).

If the Internet, by the shift of the millennium, was seen as an increasingly commercially appropriated (enclosed, gated, regulated) space, it is not surprising that the unregulated file sharing that ensued was seen as a “remnant of the old anarchy” (Nissenbaum 2004: 203). The ethos of free sharing has been interpreted as heroic by many commentators, as it calls into memory those legendary exploits that, by and large, made the digital environment into what it is today.

What is perhaps more interesting in Nissenbaum’s account, however, is how shifts in social ontology entail marginalization:

Although shifting the meaning of hacking does not immediately cause those identified with the earlier hacker ideology to disappear, it causes them effectively to disappear into what Bowker and Star call the marginal residual: namely, atypical members of a category that do not fit salient characterizations. Lodged at the margins, these hackers lose their robust identity and with that goes recognition of their ideas, ideals, and ideologies that comprise an alternative vision for a networked society.

(Nissenbaum 2004: 211)

In actual fact, she writes, hacker exploits had at the same time already begun to suffuse the mainstream technoculture that was allegedly hostile to it: Tim Berners-Lee was inspired by a hacker ethos; hacking provided blueprints regarding how to manage design processes; the commercial software world adopted open-source approaches; a hacker ethos suffused also those broad political coalitions that defeated the Communications Decency Act in 1996 and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) fifteen years later. Paradoxically, although the original meaning of hacking became untenable, key aspects of social organization were characterized by hacking writ large.

Tellingly, in the new millennium, the hacker exploit has also become an influential approach to management and entrepreneurialism. In Sweden, Palmås (2011a) has written about how entities such as TPB upset established notions of what constitutes an economically viable innovation, as well as how economic innovation has social and political effects. In our present era, perhaps the most efficient form of political intervention is not to conduct protest in conventional, argumentative, text-based form but to construct new infrastructures altogether by way of exploits that are, in certain aspects, entrepreneurial.

These are tendencies that could equally be seen to be happening with file sharing, if file sharers are lodged at the margins while the new norm— streaming—takes center stage. This book is an investigation as to whether this is currently the case.

1.2 The Technological and the Political

At the beginning of the past decade, Barry (2001) argued that the space of government is increasingly dissociated from the ways national populations relate to national territories. In contemporary technological society . . .

government operates not just in relation to spaces defined and demarcated by geographical or territorial boundaries but in relation to zones formed through the circulation of technical practices and devices. Practices of government are as much oriented towards the problems of defending, connecting and restructuring such technological spaces, as with older concerns with the defence and demarcation of physical territory.

(Barry 2001: 3)

He writes about the management of a technological society: “an era obsessed by a series of interconnected technological problems.” While society could not be argued to be more or less technological than before, he maintains, questions relating to technology “have acquired a new sense of urgency and centrality in contemporary political life” (ibid.). This requires a technologically endowed citizen; not only does contemporary society ask its citizens to have the skill, knowledge, and capacities to be able to fully engage with the world, as will be seen, but also many of today’s problems and disputes stem from the fact that civic control and prowess of highly advanced technologies come with their own opportunities and controversies. In a technological society, civic engagement turns on expertise. The argument could—and should—be made that political power, as ...