Sharing files is your right
p2pnet.net News Feature:- When I first moved to Canada from London, England, in 1979, I briefly held a job on the wire desk of a daily newspaper in Ontario. I say briefly because they fired me when I wouldn’t use their new computer to cast off headlines.
That might tell you three things
1- I trained as a journalist when they were still using Linotype, introduced around 1886 to make the solid lines of type used in stories, which were in turned locked into frames to make up the pages. Casting off headlines more or less meant making them fit;
2 - I was a Luddite; and,
3 - I’ve been around a while.
Why am I saying this? For years I steadfastedly refused to have anything to do with the Internet because, frankly, it scared the shit out of me. Then one day someone told me about sound cards, MIDI and email. And it blew my mind.
So music got me online – or I, should say, the awareness that I could communicate freely with other musicians by sharing digital music files got me online. But the files I’m talking about weren’t owned by the labels or the studios.
It went like this: I’d enter notes by hand into a MIDI app, one by one, using my computer keyboard. I’d use the app to turn the entries into a drum line and a bass line, let’s say, which I could save as a .mid file. I could then email that file to someone somewhere else who’d add lead guitar and who’d then send it to someone else to add keyboards. We could all tinker with the finished result and listen to he results on our sound cards.
MAGIC!!!!
This was literally sharing music.
So. Someone told me p2pnet had been mentioned in a file sharing story in Der Spiegel, a German magazine with an online site. I went for a look and couldn’t understand a word. And the person who’d told me about it in the first place wasn’t online.
But it wasn’t the story that caught me eye so much as three pix featured in it.
Given the context, they had to have something to do with file sharing. But I still couldn’t read the article.
My wife speaks several languages like a native and has a passing knowledge of German. But she was outside in the sunshine with our seven-year-old daughter, Emma, and the girl who’d told me about the Der Spiegel piece still wasn’t around. That left …
… Google. Or the Google translation machine, I should say.
Then it struck me. What am I doing? I’m about to go to a Net site to get text translated from a foreign (to me) language into English. It won’t be perfect, but at least I’ll be able to get the gist.
If that isn’t magic, what is?
And that made me remember the Net is magic. That the kinds of technologies being developed so people can use it in ever more creative ways are magic. And that the ability to share not just music, but all kinds of other information, date, materials – whatever you want to call it – is magic too.
And that no one – absolutely NO one – has the right to impede or stop this magic.
What about the pix?
The first, “Motive search from the campaign of the German filmwirtschaft”
The second, “Master of the rings: “injustice consciousness of the final consumer sharpen”
And the third, “Motive Knastbrueder: “discussions energize”
They’re apparently part of an entertainment industry campaign to drive home the message that people who share files online are wicked criminals.
And that’ll be another story.
Jon Newton
