Digital Culture Industry
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Digital Culture Industry

A History of Digital Distribution

James Allen-Robertson

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eBook - ePub

Digital Culture Industry

A History of Digital Distribution

James Allen-Robertson

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About This Book

How did digital media happen? Through a unique approach to digital documents, and detailed intricate histories of illicit internet piracy networks, The Digital Culture Industry goes beyond the Napster creation myth and illuminates the unseen individuals, code and events behind the turn to digital media.

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Year
2013
ISBN
9781137033475
1
Introduction
The trial of the pirate kings
On 16 February 2009, four men stood accused of the promotion and facilitation of copyright infringement. The four defendants, Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström were identified by the prosecution as the key agents that ran the Pirate Bay, an internationally infamous hub of media piracy. The plaintiffs, Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal, were demanding two years in jail for each defendant, as well as up to $180,000 in fines.
The trial lasted for little over three weeks; however, for that short period the Stockholm criminal court became a representational microcosm of the larger changes occurring in industrialised, informational societies. As events unfolded in the courtroom, a group of journalists live-blogged and Twittered from an adjacent room, whilst others inside and outside the court translated the courtroom’s live audio feed from Swedish into a multitude of other languages. Automated Twitterbots collected all tweets related to the trial – marked by the posters with the tag ‘#spectrial’ – and distributed them as a central feed for anyone who wished to follow the debate in real time.
The debates within the courtroom revealed a disjuncture of perspectives between the prosecution and the defence. The prosecution’s argument was that the defendants actively engaged in the provision and distribution of copyrighted material through the Pirate Bay. Their aim was to bring down the four men who they perceived to be the ringleaders of global digital piracy. This would set a precedent they could use to quell the rampant unauthorised distribution of their content that had been taking place for almost a decade. The defence’s argument was twofold: they as individuals had no part in the illicit distribution of copyrighted material, and file-sharing was much, much larger than they were. Their testimonies throughout the trial repeatedly iterated that no copyrighted material ever touched their servers. They insisted that the actual content of the site was user produced and that it was the users that decided what to make available on the Pirate Bay. Even ownership and responsibility for the site was uncertain. When the prosecution demanded the identity of the individual ultimately responsible for the site, they became visibly frustrated with the anarchic structure that consisted of an extended decentralised network of individuals with server privileges (Swartz, 2009b). As far as the defence was concerned, no-one owned the Pirate Bay; it belonged to everyone.
The confusion didn’t end there because the decentralised structure of the site’s communication system sabotaged the prosecution’s technical evidence. When Magnus MĂ„rtensson, lawyer for the prosecution, presented his evidence, he wasn’t prepared for the reaction he received. MĂ„rtensson had acted as a user at the site, downloading music albums with the same software as any other user would whilst documenting the process via screen shots. Though the process seemed solid it was quickly challenged by defendant Gottfrid Svartholm. Svartholm knew the tech, and he knew there was no proof that the Pirate Bay’s hardware had been used during the transfer of copyrighted material. Throughout MĂ„rtensson’s documentation process the software he was using had autonomously been making its own decisions, and MĂ„rtensson had no evidence of what those decisions were. The software had been running systems called ‘DHT’ and ‘peer-exchange’, systems that meant groups of computers could cluster together to distribute information, without anything (such as the Pirate Bay) co-ordinating them. As MĂ„rtensson had no other documentation detailing the actions of these algorithmic agents, he was forced to admit that he had no evidence of the Pirate Bay’s involvement with the process of data distribution. Though the Pirate Bay had opened the door to a network of unauthorised digital distribution, any number of other systems run by other people in other countries may have been responsible for the network’s co-ordination; or, thanks to the autonomy of the software, none at all.
The site under scrutiny was not the only system of its kind, nor was it the largest. It was one of the more famous ones, meaning it had garnered more attention from the media industry than others did, but there were hundreds more. Some of them had sites to visit where users could find their way to media content. Others were fairly anonymous systems, co-ordinating in the background for users who’d never even heard their name. The reprimand of the four individuals standing in court was not a panacea to the problem of media piracy. However, the copyright industries were becoming desperate. It had been eight years since they had won the fight against Napster and since then piracy just seemed to be getting more prevalent, more disparate and more difficult to pin down. The studios fighting the Pirate Bay were focusing their efforts on four individuals with the aim of quelling a social change far beyond the remit of four individuals. They looked for a hierarchy but were presented with networks – organisational and technological. Throughout the trial the defendants never placed themselves as leaders of a media revolution, but instead foregrounded an assemblage of communication technologies, changing social norms and the political ideology of the pirate.
This book
This book is about that assemblage of technological innovation, changing social norms and ideological drive. It is about the synergising of the copyright industries with information technology and its disruption of, and its absorption into, contemporary capitalism. More specifically it is about the interrelations between key actors, events, organisations and computer code, and how they drove and directed the development of our contemporary digital mediascape. To get to the point, it is about how illegal digital piracy made legitimate digital media distribution what it is today. It is about the history of digital media distribution.
The ‘copyright industries’ (Potts et al., 2008) are often identified as the music industry, the film industry, the television networks and the publishing industry, and we can also add advertising and the relatively young software industry to what is becoming a key economic group in the Western economy. The role that these industries have in Western capitalism has been discussed greatly by a variety of theorists such as Miùge (1989), Bagdikian (1983, 2004), Hesmondhalgh (2007) and McChesney (1993, 1999, 2004). Often these discussions take a political economy approach, where there is a clear concern that the concentration of power in these various media industries is damaging to our society. As Hesmondhalgh (2007) points out, concentration, mergers and takeovers are inherent in capitalism and are in no way unique to the culture industries. However, for many that take a liberal, critical stance on the monopolisation of cultural production, it is that these industries are monopolising our culture which is the key issue; a perspective more presently found in the work of law scholars Lawrence Lessig (2005, 2008) and James Boyle (2009), fiction author, columnist and activist Cory Doctorow (2008), and to a lesser extent ex-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Programme, Henry Jenkins (2008). This concern with cultural monopolisation expressed in these texts alongside a broad vox populi critique is derivative of the core arguments from the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their seminal essay, ‘The Culture Industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997). This essay, though both rejected and developed by theorists such as Miùge (1989), still retains its status as the first significant critique of mass culture.
More recent work has attempted to revitalise the critical theorists’ conceptualisation of the culture industries. Lash and Lury’s ‘Global Culture Industry’ (2007) looked to update Adorno and Horkheimer through a focus on the brand. In their view the brand had become the dominant output of the culture industries in contemporary developed societies. In the introduction to their work they lay out their perspective on how the culture industries have changed with the influx of the brand and the devaluing of the commodity. They make an argument for the end of the top-down mechanised power of centralised cultural control. Instead they argue that cultural domination has taken the form of dynamic symbolic brands. Through their re-appropriation by consumers into their everyday lives, brands afford power to the culture industries through this covert infiltration into their everyday thoughts and interactions with others. However, though ‘Global Culture Industry’ positions itself as a development of the culture industry idea, updated for our symbol-saturated times, its research focus is chronologically situated before the mass digital distribution of culture where ‘Digital Culture Industry’ begins. This work conceptually and substantively addresses a different development of the copyright industries, one that I would argue to be closer to the original commodity-focused theories of the critical theorists than the diversion into branding taken by the more recent iteration. This work is not a continuation of the work by Lash and Lury, but an entirely separate diversion. Though I should be standing on the shoulders of giants, I don’t necessarily have to keep to a chronological order. This work draws from Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry without the contemporary mediation offered by Lash and Lury.
However, that is not to say that this work is a close follower of Adorno and Horkheimer either. As my research began it became apparent that the original culture industry concept is weakened by its abstracted and simple portrayal of the sphere of cultural production. It is a simplification that has held much weight in political economy conceptualisations of the copyright industries. Much of contemporary popular critique of mass culture draws from the tenets of their essay: that mass culture is debased; profit-centric; and used to subjugate the population. Yet Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument seeks to simplify the narrative of cultural industrialisation, making often convoluted, complex stories of multiple interacting actors and influences deceivingly simplistic. This book appropriates the term ‘culture industry’ for good reason. It too is concerned with how the mechanisms of culture’s circulation and engagement actively impact upon society. It shares the belief that there is power in the control of media’s circulation. However, where it diverges greatly is the core of this book. Far from being a top-down domination of culture by corporate forces, the digital culture industry is a story of conflict, creative disruption and the intertwining of ‘corporate’ and countercultural social spheres. Perhaps more importantly, unlike the abstract macro narrative painted by the critical theorists, the narrative of the digital culture industry is far from simple.
A far from simple narrative
A story that has been told many times over is the tale of how a disruptive young upstart brought media in digital form to the masses, and through illicit file-sharing technology, forced the copyright industries to change their worn-out ways. The Napster story has become the creation myth for our current world of digital media, but many times the detail is overlooked and the story is often portrayed as a battle of opposing sides – the recording industry versus the people, the innately good and the innately evil, the roles of course being swapped depending on personal perspective. However, there is much more to the digital culture story than Napster, which this book hopes to address.
The history begins in Chapter 3, which looks at the early years of digital media distribution. The chapter covers the development of the MP3 format, designed with portability and ease of access in mind, but with no intention for it to reach the mass market. The history then moves on to the creation of the famous MP3-enthusiast site, MP3.com. A key influence in the early days of digital distribution, MP3.com pre-empted many of today’s innovations and services in digital media. The chapter covers its rise, court cases, and eventual dismantling and appropriation into the first industry-approved digital download services. Of course there is the Napster story, not a story of sudden genius and unerring rebellion, but one of collaborative programming communities, venture capital and a network design cultivated not for information freedom but for information dominance. Napster’s development, transformation into a business and eventual court cases are covered in parallel with the MP3.com story.
Napster allowed the movement of music; however, today people are using these networks to distribute films, television programmes, software, images, text and entire archives of data. The technical leap from Napster to now cannot be overlooked, not simply because it is a sloppy narrative, but because it was what happened after Napster that had the real impact. The politically driven network GNUtella introduced a liberal information ethic to the fray of peer-to-peer (P2P) piracy and provided the technical foundations for the tsunami of P2P networks that followed in Napster’s wake. Chapter 4 provides a detailed account of the development and implementation of the first truly decentralised and community-driven P2P network – GNUtella. The history follows the technology through its development by anarchic programmer Justin Frankel, and beyond to its wider adoption by communities of free-software programmers. The first half of the chapter, ‘Nullsoft’, lays out Frankel’s career as an independent programmer, his ideological belief of ‘sustainable software’ and the eventual buyout of his company by AOL. The second half, ‘GNUtella’ describes Frankel’s time under AOL and his surreptitious development of the GNUtella software. The section goes on to follow the ad hoc communities that took over its development and its wide dissemination into various legitimate ventures. The chapter ends with ‘Politically decentralised’, a conceptual examination of how the ways in which GNUtella differed from Napster provided the tools for a robust decentralised file-sharing community.
Chapter 5 explores the story of the FastTrack protocol, the technology behind the most prominent and influential P2P file-sharing software of the mid-2000s. The chapter begins by following entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis whose controversial software company developed and licensed P2P software for other companies to run their own file-sharing platforms. The chapter begins with ‘Zennström & Friis’, a look at the development of the software and company, as well as the conflicts and issues they experienced in their attempts to operate a legitimate company with an illicit product. ‘Sharman takes over’ follows the sale of the company and the file-sharing software ‘Kazaa’ to Sharman Networks and the ways in which Zennström & Friis managed the licensing of their FastTrack protocol. ‘Grokster v. MGM’ follows the landmark case in the US that rewrote intellectual property (IP) law to deal with the encroaching threat of digital piracy made possible by the prevalence of FastTrack. ‘Incorporating the competition’ looks at how the FastTrack code and the illicit actors in the narrative became integrated into various legitimate business ventures. Finally, the chapter ends with ‘The business of piracy’, a look at how Frankel’s network design was subverted into a highly controlled, exploitable system of illicit piracy, and the unintended consequences that came from the fusion of Frankel’s design with business logic.
Chapter 6 examines BitTorrent, the most recent development in P2P file-sharing. The narrative begins with Bram Cohen, and his very personal drive to produce the most efficient data transfer system in the world. The chapter begins with ‘Perfect’, a look at Cohen’s development of the BitTorrent software and how his design reversed the rules of network communication. The chapter continues with ‘The legitimate BitTorrent’, a look at Cohen’s uneasy foray into turning BitTorrent into a business venture, the softening reactions of the incumbent movie industry to P2P, and his venture’s eventual failure due to industry licensing demands. The final part of the chapter, and of the illicit histories, is the story of the Pirate Bay, an infamous piracy site that utilised BitTorrent to allow its users to share copyrighted material across the internet. The section charts the website’s history, from its roots in the Swedish political art group PiratbyrĂ„n, through to its role in the development of the first ‘Pirate Party’, a political party that campaigns for IP reform. The section also follows the site’s legal conflicts, its nomadic life moving from one country to another and the problems faced by the courts in dealing with an international, decentralised network. The chapter ends with ‘A piratical ideology’, arguing that the primary impact of the site was not as a facilitator of copyright infringement, but as a disseminator of piratical ideology.
Having provided the background to digital distribution’s illicit past, the book continues by focusing on the values and ideology that drove it, the industry that resisted it and the changes this conflict has made to the copyright industries and our engagement with their products. Chapter 7, ‘Hacking the market’, presents the two perspectives at play in the conflict of digital distribution: the perspective of the incumbent media industries, and the values and drive of programming communities and software developers. The chapter begins with ‘Keeping it in the family’, a look at the value the compact disc (CD) had brought to the music industry and its reluctance to enter into the digital market. The section presents an argument for the actions of the copyright industries but also demonstrates how their reluctance left them vulnerable to the capacities of the digital medium, and the communities that were skilled in its manipulation. These communities are addressed in ‘A hacker’s market’, where the ideology of the ‘hacker ethic’, demonstrated throughout the Napster, GNUtella and BitTorrent histories is laid out. The section demonstrates how the hacker ethic placed those most interested in digital distribution in the perfect position to implement it, causing great disruption for the incumbent media industries. The incumbent industries, through their reluctance, were not only forced to compete with illicit digital distribution in price, but also with the definition and expectations of digital media.
Chapter 8 looks at the ways in which contemporary legitimate digital media vendors, borne on the back of digital distribution’s illicit past, operate. The chapter begins with ‘Bring in the technologists!’, the story of Apple’s iTunes Store and how the first successful legal download store was founded. The story illustrates the ways in which expectations of digital media grounded in piracy led to the shift of power away from the world’s biggest recording labels, to the sphere of information technology. The chapter continues with ‘Codes of control’, an examination of the ways in which digital distribution has afforded new regulatory powers for the copyright industries and their new digital partners. The section begins with a short story about Sony Entertainment’s attempts to implement security into its CDs. The story illustrates the tension between the models of selling media as a product, and selling media as a licence. The section goes on to discuss the digital media product, and how its instantiation as data allows these unprecedented levels of regulation by media vendors. The section ‘Competing with free’ looks at the ways in which the digital medium allows vendors to deliver media in a form that competes with the open pirate market and mimics the standards set by the hacker ideology. It examines the terms of service of some of the most successful digital retailers, and demonstrates how these terms allow them to provide new ways of engaging with media, as well as new forms of long-term relationship between vendors and customers. The chapter ends with a summary argument that our contemporary digital retailers, to balance the demands of the pirate market and the necessities of retailing IP, have significantly altered the way we engage with and understand media.
The concluding chapter begins with ‘A history of digital distribution’, where the focus moves away from the small historical details, and broadens to examine the history as a whole. The section uses this perspective to consider the history of digital distribution as an all-encompassing narrative to enable us to understand the roots of digital distribution and its societal impact better. The second half of the chapter, ‘Change’, looks at how the story of digital distribution can demonstrate mechanisms of social change and technological innovation. It also makes an argument for a micro approach to sociological history, one that focuses on building grand narratives of change based on micro empirical details.
The rationale for this perspective of social change, and the new digital documentary methods that support it, is where the...

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