As I'm a huge fan of Revision3, this post in my RSS yesterday caught my attention immediately:
"MediaDefender Behind the Attack on Revision3" [from ReadWriteWeb by Sarah Perez]. According to Sarah,
MediaDefender is a company that acts on behalf of other media companies to muck up P2P and file sharing networks. A post on the Rev3 blog today reveals that the company responsible for this weekend's DoS attack on their servers was none other than MediaDefender. Revision3 uses Bittorrent to help distribute their shows across the web by running their own tracker which coordinates the sharing and downloading of their content. Despite this perfectly legal and legitimate practice, MediaDefender set their sights on Revision3's servers and flooded them with SYN packets, effectively shutting them down.
The fact that they're banging on the servers of my beloved Revision3 is upsetting enough. But then my mind went off, as it usually does. What came of this is below.
Note that I am in no way defending the sharing and distribution of illegal content, in whatever form. I am only writing to the principle of the matter based on my belief that, regardless of how people choose to use or abuse it, P2P is here to stay, and people benefit from it. And lest we think that fighting about P2P is new, remember that we have a long and sordid history of various industries over the decades crying foul whenever a new technology came along that threatened their business model. In MediaDefender's case, they're simply a new handle on an old axe. A very sharp, heavy axe.
Examples of this longstanding fighting include the Photocopier, VHS player/recorder, MP3 player, and even the hyperlink has been challenged. (For more on hyperlinks, I wrote a paper about British Telecom v. Prodigy Communications, in which the hyperlink itself almost was sued out of existence. Let me know if you'd like a copy). For discussions about copyright and our culture of ownership, see Lawrence Lessig's works, including Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, as well as this article, which rebuffs the MPAA's 2003 "Copying is Theft" campaign during the so-called "Golden Age of Free Music" (see article here , and a bit more on the 2-handedness here ). While you're at it, check out Carolyn Marvin's excellent book, When Old Technologies Were New .
So, back to the story.
Just for fun, I strolled on over to MediaDefender's um, website. So, at the same time they are trying to beat peer-to-peer into the ground as a vector of evil with one hand, a closer look on their site suggests that the other hand (see here, here, and here) is busy "leveraging" P2P and enabling ways for the "Consumer/Fan" to have "...the special experience of 'discovering' the new content" and to provide the "Sponsors/Advertiser" with the ability to, as they say,"Engage millions of targeted customers with desires." So we're getting music video and audio teasers. Really? That's all they can think of to use P2P for?
First, I have a visceral reaction to the "Consumer/Fan" label. This is about the same degree of Maalox-inducing discomfort I experience whenever I hear an IT staffer refer to someone as a "user." As if the act of appreciating music (or any art for that matter) can be reduced to the level of buying a burger and fries at the local fast food joint.
Second, the only activity I can think of that engages customers with their "desires" isn't safe to blog / read about at work.
I've believed this for some time that, for all of the legal battles the MPAA, RIAA, and the like have been waging against P2P, they have been quietly figuring out how to use P2P to their advantage. So, once the bad stuff is gone and all the "Consumer/Fans" are sued into submission, what will be left is the content chosen for us to have access to. And we better like it. When it comes to distributing and publicizing content, rather than pay an expensive marketing firm, it's far easier and cheaper to use P2P, under the guise that we, as customers, are still getting exactly what we are looking for, "...free content," or if we'll super duper lucky, we'll be "presented with unique and compelling offerings that fit [our] tastes." Woohoo. Sign me up.
Further, rather than a marketing campaign ending when the budget runs out, P2P runs 24/7 off of "Consumer/Fans' " systems. So, Media Defender's clients have the added benefit that their "Files continue to live and spread virally, even after the campaigns is ended." Um, yeah. As if this were a feature specially-created by MediaDefender. That's how P2P works. So, while P2P networks are being shut down, the remaining bandwidth is filled with what amounts to simply more advertising, except for now the distribution is on the "Consumer's / Fan's" dime. Unfortunately, P2P, by its design, provides an amazingly targeted audience that no marketing firm could ever claim to provide on its own. So it should be no surprise that MediaDefender has discovered a way to sell P2P back to its clients packaged as a marketing platform.
Suspiciously, all the legal battles over the past years have seemed to be less about actual theft, and more about the fact that these industries were caught completely off-guard because they were resting on their old ways of business. So, suing everyone and their mother (literally), bides time for the industries to figure out (if ever) how to make money off the new technology, to use it as yet another advertising platform rather than realize its (in this case, P2P's) true potential. It's as if horse breeders would have sued Henry Ford for introducing the mass-produced automobile to the world, and all the while trying to figure out how to put wheels and a steering wheel on a horse. It just doesn't work.
It's funny that we as "Consumers/Fans" are seen as little more than open wallets, especially when the poster boy for the early days of the Anti-Napster and P2P crackdown was none other than Lars Ulrich of Metallica. In a 2000 Wired article about Metallica's involvement in the first volley of lawsuits against Naptster, Ulrich was quoted as saying, "We take our craft -- whether it be the music, the lyrics, or the photos and artwork -- very seriously, as do most artists. It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."
Regardless of the legality, I don't think people who trade art, whether exchanged via mixed tapes, bootlegs, or P2P networks, view the art necessarily as a commodity; in fact, the heaviest traders are likely to be also the biggest fans. So, the only people treating art like a commodity are those who stand to profit the most from controlling not only the means of production and the means of access, but also what gets called "art" and how much it is to be valued. That being said, it's those who create the art in the first place, as well as those who love the art, who have the most to lose.
Again, I'm not condoning the sharing and distribution of illegal content. I'm simply arguing for the principle of the matter that I don't think it's right to call somebody a criminal on one hand based on the tools they are using to exchange content, and then expect them to be your captive marketing audience on the other using the same exact tool! And calling the act of hijacking links to redirect to targeted advertising "interactive," this content is claimed to be, (and, by interactive, we're talking merely redirection to where you want us to go), as described below on Media Defender's website.
Peer-to-Peer networks are similar to ‘Google’ - both take search requests and deliver content; but peer-2-peer networks are more ‘fun’ than ‘Google’ because instead of taking you to a webpage they deliver: movies, music, videogames, TV shows, etc. This makes our Redirection service like running an interactive television (video) commercial that is only viewed by your targeted audience and given the ability to interact and make immediate purchasing decisions. [From MediaDefender - Peer-2-Peer Marketing Solutions]
Don't even get me started on what's wrong with the rest of the passage's descriptions, other than the Internets must really be like a series of tubes. Who knew?
