p2pnet.net special:- It seems Hungary is about to become another country to be invaded by the entertainment cartels.

Hungarian ISPs Vodafone and UPC have decided to limit clients’ use of file sharing programs, says caboodle.hu, quoting mfor.hu.

“In several Western European countries, this practice has been used for a while, introduced after complaints from copyright protection organizations,” says the story going on:.

One condition of using Vodafone’s new mobile internet packages, including one unlimited service for Ft 5,000 a month, is that clients do not use file sharing programs to illegally download music via peer-to-peer networks. The company said it did not want clients to overload the network by keeping their machines on to download files around the clock. Instead it wanted customers who use the internet for browsing and sending and receiving e-mails to enjoy a fast service.

UPC started limiting file sharing without informing clients on its broadband services. Customers quickly noticed the change and posted their experiences on online forums. The company admitted to slowing down the speed of file sharing programs and called the practice “priorizing.” At peak times, file sharing programs are sent to the “back of the queue” and more bandwidth is given to browsers.

Hungary’s other internet providers have not started using this practice but have not ruled out doing so in the future. Data privacy ombudsman Attila Péterfalvi told mfor.hu that the practice is legal; internet providers have a right to monitor what type of programs their clients use.

Exactly what is the situation in Hungary? Here’s Bodó Balázs‘ take:

R0b1n H00d5 D16174|
Vernacular cultures in the digital age
By Bodó Balázs

Fulbright Visiting Researcher, Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society

Budapest University of Technology and Economics,
Department of Sociology and Communications

Center for Media Research and Education

Abstract

It is hard to find anyone who does not condemn the illegal swapping of digital cultural goods in the public discourse on file sharing networks. Copying is killing the music, the music industry, it hurts national economies and the global economy and terrorist organizations are financed through piracy. But this vision of the Intellectual Property Armageddon is only one way of looking at the impact of file-sharers on the flow of cultural goods. When it comes to small and secluded linguistic cultural communities beyond the global English language universe, file-sharing might have a surprisingly significant impact on the accessibility of cultural goods.

1. Digital outlaws

On the morning of the 5th of July, someone in the Nostalgia Music Forum by the name of ‘Kirill’ asked for songs by Tamas Balassa, the pianist in the Hungarian Public Radio Orchestra and leader of Balassa Group. He also wrote several hits in the 60s and early 70s. He had his 15 minutes of fame and most of his oeuvre was never released again, except for a few songs in a few compilations. It now takes years of digging on the flea markets to find his remaining singles. Who knows where ‘Kirill’ heard about him? Maybe his parents were fans of Balassa? Maybe he’d heard something on a late night radio show? What is known, though, is that 12 hours later, a senior user of the forum by the name ‘helper’ posted links pointing to several Balassa songs with an obscure .ati extension, meaning they need to be renamed as mp3s to reveal the freshly digitized content.

Be that as it may, ‘Kirill’ can now download the songs —— along with the 8,000 other forum users.

In January 2005, the administrator of the Silent Library Project, an emerging archive scanning, digitizing, OCR-ing, reviewing, formatting and collecting texts, asked the 10,000-strong community if anyone had a hard copy of Italo Calvino’s ‘Eleink,’ a collection of his short stories in Hungarian.

The book isn’t rare: around 60,000 were published in the 70s and one can sometimes buy a used copy in a second-hand book store for around $5. But the admin didn’t want to wait for a lucky day at the bargain bins, and he didn’t have to. Another user, ’scan_dal,’ had a copy. He scanned it, organized the OCR, a review, formatting, and so on, and eight months later, the complete text was online, and already downloaded more than 1,400 times.

During our recent visit in Bucharest, Romania, our friends there have advised us to go and see Lucian Pintilie’s film Balanta – the Oak, set during Ceausescu’s dictatorship. The film seemed to be unavailable in Hungary. We could not find copies to rent or buy, the Romanian Cultural Institute also declined us. There were some used VHSs to buy from Amazon.com, but second hand sellers cannot ship to and receive payments from Hungary, so this transaction was not possible either. But all was not lost because Romanian film fanatics had posted the entire Romanian film-archive to an IRC channel, where anyone can request a chat-bot to send him/her the files. Within a few hours, not only the film, but also the English (French, Danish, as you wish) subtitles were downloaded. Months later, I stumbled on a single copy in a small cinema in downtown Budapest, released by a company specializing in Eastern-European art movies. We bought that last DVD.

The examples can be freely continued. Bootleg recordings of early Hungarian punk groups. Manga available only on the Japanese market. Banned Chinese films. Contemporary Hungarian documentaries aired only once on public TV, and then after 1 AM, but which are nonetheless online, waiting to be downloaded, listened to, viewed, enjoyed. But these downloaders are hardly only consumers: they are the ones who digitize, preserve, add subtitles and catalogue records, share with everyone or only with their close peers pieces of the local and global mainstream and marginal culture. Copyright infringement? – You bet. Pirating, stealing from the authors, publishers? – maybe, maybe not. And in the meantime, they create and maintain the world’s most extensive cultural archive.

For free.

2. Share and enjoy!

File sharing on the internet went mainstream at the end of 1999. The Napster and Shawn Fanning story has been told many times (most recently by Liebowitz 2006) so I won’t go into it again here. But it’s worth noting that the growing penetration of broadband internet, CD and DVD readers/writers and MP3 players all contribute to an ever growing number and variety of cultural goods available for online exchange.

One might also take into consideration the sophistication and multiplication of file-sharing technologies and the relative safe haven of darknets to explain the significant increase of swapped files, as well as filesharers. But the fact that illegal file-sharing activity has grown at the same the time wide-scale lawsuits were, and are, targeted against individual users as well as technology companies suggests other explanations. The literature on file-sharing (see for example Geralds 2001; Liebowitz 2006; IFPI 2006) may not agree on the exact numbers and causes but the increase is consensual.

It’s difficult to get a clear understanding of the amount of cultural goods available on file sharing networks, or of the exact number of illegal file-sharers and downloaders. Those who are trying to measure these activities (comScore Media Metrix, Nielsen NetRatings, BigChampagne, Pew Internet and the American Life Project in the US, collecting societies, IP advocacy groups elsewhere) often report numbers of different magnitudes, a direct consequence of the lack of a commonly accepted measurement methodology. Methods based on the automated monitoring of the networks are problematic because of the high number and the diversity of networks, and methods based on self-reporting tend to underestimate the real weight of file-sharing due to its illegal nature.

If we try to compile the different sources into one graph the differences became apparent:

We find a similar situation if we try to estimate the size of this illegal library, and the number of cultural items available for downloading. Various measurements from different years estimate between 500 and 1,000 million songs have become available in the last few years. But these don’t take into account files from the traditional file-sharing p2p networks, which means files available through BBS, IRC, FTP and all the other protocols, aren’t taken into account. We find a similar situation if we try to estimate the size of this illegal library, the number of cultural items available for downloading. Various measurements from different years estimate that between 500 and 1000 million songs were available during the last few years. These estimates hardly count files outside of the traditional file-sharing networks, thus they do not take into account the files available through BBSs, IRC, FTP and all the other protocols.

The ‘illegal’ supply might be difficult to measure, but it’s easy to judge against the size of legally available libraries.

According to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) Report 2006, two million songs are available for download from hundreds of legal online services. And that’s exactly two million more than when Napster first went online, capturing the attention of millions of music lovers around the world. Much of the hard work of convincing record company executives that the Net presents a worthwhile market was done by Apple with its iTunes/iPod DRM protected software-hardware combo. Much of the success goes to them as well, if one can call it a success when the two billion songs reportedly sold still use only a tiny fraction of the overall capacity of all the iPods available, and the massive difference between the legal library (two million) and the illegal one (said to be one billion) calls for further examination.

3. Cultural industries – not again!

Let’s suppose, for a moment, the estimate of an archive holding a billion cultural files is more or less accurate, at least in magnitude. It was created from individual collections and individual efforts: CDs ripped, old movies on VHS and Super8 digitized, books scanned and OCR-ed. The huge cost was willingly met by the users themselves. The incentives to bear these costs are numerous, out of which the insurmountable urge to share is only one. Making existing cultural goods available in digital format is surely one of the strong factors behind the phenomena. Users needed these things in digital format well before any of the owners were willing to release their inventory in digital formats. Filling in the white spots of the official supply must be another reason. People were digitizing because they had seen that there was little or no access to certain goods in any other way. Also, while the demand for goods – manga comics, garage rock, academic textbooks – was already global, the markets were still local. So the users – in need of something conventional suppliers thought they’d never need – simply circumvented the inadequate system. Finally, the simple economics of sharing networks, which promise a huge return on a small investment, also kicked in, shaping an emergent digitization process that was quicker, cheaper and more thorough than any other market driven or government sponsored program.

The question now is whether or not there’s a limit to the size of the current ‘legal’ library. Chris Anderson would argue (Anderson 2006) there’s no reason to think the entire back catalog won’t be digitized, so it becomes available through some purely digital or hybrid marketplace. But we need to ask if the rules governing cultural distribution and accessibility in the past have changed enough so we can expect the market players in general to come forward with a complete digital back catalog. Also, we have to look at whether or not rules applicable in a global, English speaking, digitally advanced context still apply for small, vernacular, poorer cultural entities.

Cultural industries tend to thrive around technologies that allow mass reproduction and distribution. Benkler has noted (Benkler 2006) we can experience a quick rise in the entry barriers in nearly all of these technologies, and the huge early profits sooner or later lead to an industry-wide concentration, a vertical and horizontal consolidation and eventually result in quasi-monopolies.

The market based systems of cultural production and distribution – like any other industry – comprise a deeply interconnected structure of legal, economic, technological and moral-normative contexts (Lessig 2000). During the second half of the 20th century, the technology of mass reproduction, and the economics of producing, distributing and marketing these cultural goods, have co-evolved with a system of copyright and intellectual property regulation that was the best fit for these economic and technological circumstances. By the end of the last century, this complex system had matured in every sense, resulting in cultural industries with strong marketing and distribution powers ideally suited to both create a global demand for products, and to fill it. Some of these multinational corporations have individual annual incomes comparable to the GDPs of many nations. But even though they directly or indirectly own a large chunk of the contemporary popular culture, and they push continually for more and stricter legal control of their back catalog (Akelof et al 2002), they’re nevertheless providing only a small portion of the legally protected works potentially available on the overall market (Schultz 2002).

There have been many estimates on what percentage of all the works in copyright are available on the market. The numbers are surprisingly low, they are systematically somewhere between 10-30%. To get more exact data one needs to have some kind of a registry that would list all works in copyright. Unfortunately only the US had some kind of registry till the moment the country has joined the Berne convention, meaning anyone looking to get data must start with an estimate of the number of works produced in the period that still has protection, and combine them with other sources that detail the current market supply.

One market we can examine is the US book market. According to the Book in Print Database there were 2.854.123 titles available on the US book market in November 2005. Sadly, we don’t know how many works were produced in the last 100 years, but we can look at the dates of the first publication of these nearly 3 million books:

The bulk of the current book supply is made up of pretty recent books, which isn’t surprising. New authors, new works, new bestsellers keep the multi-million dollar marketing machines alive, and the distributors, merchants are also have their interest in newer and newer waves of fashionable works, high in circulation, low in shelf life. The average shelf life of a book is around three months and most of the bestsellers are not reprinted after two years (Miller 2006). There is a simple reason for that: books with the highest demand are the best candidates to pay for the physical costs (work, storage, stocking) of the distribution. This simple economic logic limits the stock of an average brick-and-mortar bookstore to somewhere between 40.000-100.000. Any book beyond this limit does not pay for the cost of physical space needed to carry it.

We find the same situation if we turn to the US film market, which has much more detailed data available:

Even though audiovisual works have a much higher global appeal and many more channels of distribution than texts, only 20% of the film production of the last century was available on the market in November 2005. And what’s striking is the apparent lack of movies from the 10’s and 20’s: only 509 works were commercially available out of more than 30,000 possibles.

The supply, however, doesn’t tell us anything about the shape of the demand on the market. We have to suppose there’s a demand for all cultural goods at any given time at any give place, even though it’s far from being uniform in every case. Some works are more fashionable, canonical, others address marginal audiences and marginal issues. On a purely physical infrastructure it’s nearly impossible to aggregate enough demand for these latter works to carry them economically. Works at the end of the long tail became widely available only with the advent of the internet and the online marketplaces such as Amazon.com and eBay.

As one former Amazon employee put it ‘We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.’ So the internet has definitely changed this distribution pattern, but less than one would expect. On NetFlix, an online DVD rental service, more than 75.000 (in May 2007, up from 60,000 in July 2006) titles are advertised, 8,100 (in May 2007, up from 5,000 in July 2006) of which fall under the category ‘Foreign’. So we can see that even though a hybrid distribution model goes further down the long tail, it still fails to cover 40% of US films, and carries only a tiny fraction of the world’s film production. Needless to say, NetFlix is only available to US customers. So the serious question that the missing supply of cultural goods that ‘did not sell at all yesterday’ generates the problem of forgetfulness is not quite solved in a an online environment either.

Before the Net, this 70% to 90% gap between supply and demand was bridged with secondary markets such as used book stores, community involvement such as book sharing clubs, and public institutions such as libraries and archives. In the digital environment, the question is: from whom we can expect the same? Will the market digitize and make everything accessible ? Will public institutions find their role in this context? Will Google do it? Will European Union funded initiatives be able to achieve that goal?

Or will themselves eventually solve the problem?

All the examples discussed above were from the US, an enormously wealthy English-speaking country with 250 million consumers, and mature and more or less well-functioning markets. But what does this problem look like in countries that are neither rich, nor English-speaking, which do not have mature markets and have nowhere near 250 million customers.

4. ‘Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout’ – the reconfiguration of the Hungarian cultural sphere after the fall of the wall.

To fully understand the scope of the changes which happened in Hungary from 1989, when the grip of communism was at last released, and onwards, one needs to go back at least a decade and see how the last decade of the communist system handled the issues of cultural production and distribution. There are several, often conflicting, readings of the cultural policies of the Kadar regime. It was without question the cultural policy of a communist dictatorship. But at the same time, it had an undeniable emancipatory drive as well.

As in any dictatorship, the production, reproduction and distribution of all forms of communication and culture was strictly controlled by the authorities. Cultural works and authors were classified into the three categories of Supported, Tolerated, and Prohibited. Supported cultural goods enjoyed full support from the State and Party, received funds that allowed high circulations, high publicity, etc. Tolerated works and authors were allowed, but didn’t enjoyed the privileges of Supported works. Prohibited culture could only exist in Samizdat, as covert copying and distribution of government-suppressed media in Soviet-bloc countries was known, under the close scrutiny and harassment of the authorities. Unlike in other, more ideologically rigid communist countries, works falling under the ‘Supported’ category weren’t necessarily ideologically faithful to party lines. Examples of the high cultures of Hungary, Europe and the world – poetry, literature, movies, music – were distributed inexpensively and were generally freely available in libraries. The Stalinist approach to ideological faith was supplanted by a strange emancipatory program that allocated huge amount of resources to create a cultural canon based on the ideal of literacy, education and the common European cultural heritage. The price for this was to accept the hegemony of the Party. If one didn’t question this hegemony, one was free to publish almost anything. So if we judge the decades before 1989 not by those works that were prohibited, but by what was available freely for everyone, paradoxically, almost, one can say the communist system created the ideal state in terms of cultural accessibility.

The statistics also support that claim. More than 10,000 libraries, nearly 5,000 of which were found in factories, plants, workplaces, catered to some 10 million citizens. Book-titles and recordings were published every year in quantities unseen since.

Table 5. shows not only the rise but the fall of the cultural production and distribution. On the book-market, the average circulation fell from 20,000 to less than 3,000 and while in the 80s, more than 240 works were published every year in more than 100,000 copies, this number has now fallen to 173 in 1990, 15 in 1996 and only four in 2004.

But not only have the amounts changed. The fall of the (cultural) Iron Curtain exposed the well-protected Hungarian cultural markets to global competition, as well as competition from the popular culture. In 1990 the average circulation of works by Hungarian authors came to more than 21,000. But a decade later, it less than 3,000. The average number of of poetic works fell from 7,500 to 900 between the 80s and 2003, and literary works fell from 33,000 to 5,700 in the same period. While the sales of works from foreign authors amounted to less than 20% of all sales, by the middle of 90s, this number had doubled and foreign authors now enjoy an average circulation more than three times higher that of a Hungarian author (Cserta 2002) and the bestseller lists, which once boasted the cream of Hungarian high culture, now feature pulp fiction authors and J. K. Rowling.

Other cultural fields follow the trends of the book industry. Similar landslides buried music publishing (Vályi 2006), motion picture production and to-go cultural forms . (Cserta 2002). And with the changes in production came similar changes in distribution systems. The library network was decimated by the collapse of workplace libraries of the workplaces themselves. The rich network of rural cultural institutions serving as cinemas, music halls, libraries and community places simply disappeared: the houses were closed. The terminals of culture distribution have receded to where effective, solvent demand was to be found: into urban centers. ‘The quick change in economic and legal environment erodes the basic cultural supply. This is true in qualitative, content-wise terms, in terms of the physical state of infrastructure, costs of operation and in human resources, which is an especially serious problem because due to their cheap accessibility these institutions were mostly used by lower income social groups in need for an access to cultural goods.’ (Bárdosi et al. 2004)

And indeed, this circle of regression is a vicious one: the lack of solvent demand and adequate funding ruined the distribution infrastructure, and the collapse of the distribution infrastructure, left those unserved who’d have been able to pay for these services, but who weren’t numerous enough to be served economically.

With the advent of commercial broadcasting, the traditional book and cinema-based (high) cultural sphere had to face another serious challenge. Even though the legal foundations for commercial radio were framed by the Broadcast Treaty of 1996, several commercial stations had been operating in a legal loophole since the end of 80s.

This Treaty has also established the legal framework for commercial television, and in late 1997 the first commercial channel was started. Hungarian and foreign (satellite and later cable distributed) commercial broadcasters radically rearranged audiences’ time-use. By the end of the nineties, 80% of the time previously taken up by cultural activities and traditional forms of entertainment was being used to watch television. And only 10% read of people a book or a magazine.

5. wheres the government? – the public infrastructure of cultural accessibility

Markets – in the US or in Hungary – will never be able, or willing, to supply all of the demand, nor will the structure of demand be conveniently servable. Realizing this, we use significant public resources to bridge the gap between supply and demand on the distribution side with public libraries, archives, museums; and, on the production side, public subsidies and grants to authors, publishers, producers.

In Hungary in recent years, public funds going into culture were in the range of 0.7% to 1% of the Gross Domestic Product. A large chunk (around 40%) serves as the financial background for public broadcasters, and the rest is divided up among the various cultural fields.

Supporting the library system costs between 10% and 19% of all (national and local) cultural expenditures. Beyond that museums, theatres, concert halls also needed support to be able to stay on the market. All this effort was needed to keep the cost of accessing culture affordable:

The other part of the support went into subsidizing production. Billion of Forints went into movie production, to the support of orchestras, publishers, artists, writers, translators to finance the part that the market, due to its small size cannot take care of. In 2003 the book market amounted to 50 billion HUFs, the movie market earned 10 billion in admissions, DVD sales added up to 3 billion. These sums are comparable to the amount of public support for cultural activities which also means that without public subsidy these markets would have difficulty financing themselves even in this reduced form.

There are 15 million Hungarian speakers, of whom 10 million live in Hungary, 20% of them in the capital. The remainder, mostly with lower incomes, live in less urbanized settings dispersed around the country, spending most of their time in front of the television. This makes the task of maintaining a purely market based distribution infrastructure capable of aggregating demand for anything but the very head of the cultural long tail, a very difficult one. In other words, on the face of it, public support will play as much of a central role in supporting Hungary’s cultural production and distribution in the future as it’s done in the past.

However, the situation might change with the advent of file-sharing communities and the internet.

Book-sharing – which serves half of the readers with books borrowed from friends and family (MTA 2004)- gains a new meaning online. As I said in the introduction, some users share cultural goods which are very difficult and/or costly to acquire through traditional systems of distribution. But thanks to the efforts of users digitizing and sharing these goods, many important sections of the Hungarian of culture suddenly become accessible: works that had previously been buried by the constant arrival of new bestsellers; works that had never had a chance of becoming classics, intended or otherwise; works produced for, and by, marginal groups with marginal interests; works that had never had a chance to be commercially viable; works that would otherwise have been unable to cross geographical and/or cultural gaps; works that for numerous reasons are normally well beyond the collecting scope of local libraries; works that are a part of culture and somehow, not a part of culture are found in the Silent Library, or on the forum pages of Nostalgia Music. They’re the direct results of community efforts to be taken seriously.

It’s easy to rip a CD but far more difficult to digitize a vinyl single, or convert a book into a .txt file. Commons based peer production networks (Benkler 2006) thrive in niches left free and unserved by markets serving their own needs in their own manner, sharing and coordinating community resources to create a true commons.

Some of these commons based peer production networks operate in a legal manner: identify craters or search for extra terrestrials out in space. Others rip old hits from tapes and create Hungarian subtitles to some obscure mange series only available on Japanese TV. And these networks have enormous potential. The publicly financed book-digitization program in Hungary managed to scan 900 books in seven years. Silent Library digitized more than 2,000 in less than two. And of 2,136 titles, only 194 were on the market. Without the efforts of the digitizers, the rest, 90%, would probably have been was lost forever. Nor can this tremendous revival been considered merely in terms of physical accessibility. File-sharing communities are also remembering communities. They direct attention, and thus demand. They discuss, and thus keep alive, cultural goods. When something is posted as available for download, it’s seen and possibly fetched not only those asked for, or volunteered, it, but also by those who were online nearby. These people are in effect reciting works long forgotten like those who in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 memorize books to be able to share them with others.

The closest library might be only 16 minutes away in average, but for millions of Hungarians this 16 minutes of travel leads to a library with only 7.300 titles – this is the average size of a village library. Even with the current level of internet penetration there is no denser distribution network that of the internet terminals. And when you reach for your desk, or go down to the nearest community access point, you not only find the a global library in front of you, but the fellow readers as well.

6. Pirate Republic

The transformations we witness in this 21st digital century show how changes in technology dismantle the economic and legal frameworks of how cultural industries operate. What was once critiqued by scholars from Benjamin, via Adorno till McChesney, seems to be over for good. The demand for cultural goods has become visible at last and it turns out that supply has little to do with demand in the traditional sense. Maybe this also signals the end of the traditional discourse in media and cultural studies on the ownership and control of media and content, and on how this content shapes societies. This library of Babel built, catalogued, maintained and served by dozens and millions of users raises different questions. It raises questions on the pragmatic level: how to navigate this library? Who’s to oversee at least parts of it? What technologies do, or should, serve and maintain it? Who, if anyone, decides content? Who oversee it, and by what authority?

It raises questions of economies: in which direction do entry barriers move in this context? What’ll happen to back catalogs? Who’ll make and finance the move to the digital domain? Will it always be the users? Will there be niches still left not covered by recommendation systems and online e-payment checkout gates?

It also raises legal questions. If current copyright laws are defined by the economic realities of an offline context, how will the new economics will tweak the laws governing cultural goods, and how long will it take for the changes to be felt.

And in countries such as Hungary, where during for the century gone there’s been a complete change in the economic, political and cultural systems on average once every nine years, leaving very little of any archive and collection intact, it can be translated into a policy question. Where weak market potential meets weak public institutions, what kind of policy would not prevent the users, citizens, consumers of culture making the cultural heritage accessible by any and every means.

[The author would like to thank Jon Newton of p2pnet.net for his invaluable help in editing the text for online publication.]

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• Sz?nyei Tamás: Nyilván tartottak – Titkos szolgák a magyar rock körül 1960-1990, Magyar Narancs-Tihany-Rév Kiadó, 2005
• Time – Warner 2006. 2005 Annual Report to Stockholders
• Turow, Joseph: Media Today: An Introduction to Mass Communication, Houghton Mifflin 2002
• Vályi Gábor: Valami tempósabb lemezed nincsen? In: Cafe Babel Tempó szám, 2006

Online sources:

• http://nosztalgiazene.bakelit.hu/
• http://slp.dwalin.ru
• http://www.ircspy.com
• http://www.p2pnet.net
• http://www.slyck.com
• http://www.warsystems.hu/

Slashdot it!

Also See:
caboodle.hu – Hungarian internet providers start limiting file sharing, June 25, 2007

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

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rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site

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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 8:58 am and is filed under P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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