www.p2p.edu: Rip, Mix & Burn Your Education

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Summer, 2001 by Thom Gillespie

My title for this article was found while I was into my 23rd minute on the elliptical strider at the Y. I was just entering cool down when my heart speeded up. I had found my title on the back cover of an old Business Week magazine. There, on stark white, was an object of pure technolust, Apple's new iMac in a sky-blue, off-white combination with attached headphones, CDs of the music variety, and not a keyboard or mouse in sight. Just: "Rip. Mix. Burn." titling in a 36-point Times New Roman font. The subtitle was the grabber: "The new iMac with iTunes + CD-RW. Take your favorite songs, put them in the order you want and burn a CD. After all, it's your music."

No kid in his or her right mind wants to rearrange their own CDs. They already have them. What they want to do is use Napster, Gnutella, Bearshare, or iMesh to find and trade mp3s of songs and create totally new CD arrangements for personal amusement or dance re-mixes for parties. Apple knows this is how kids will use this technology, but an ad suggesting buying a Mac to rip off the music industry is not a real good idea in these litigious times.

Regardless, I had my title to think about peer-to-peer technology.

I knew I wanted to do something with the idea of peer-to-peer for this column simply because I also love playing with Napster, Bearshare, iMesh, and other P2P applications. I'm constantly amazed at what I can type into a search window and find that is sitting there for download from all corners of the globe. I teach at Indiana University, which means the most intellectually interesting commons these days is no longer the university library or eatery but the large 24-hour scratch server, which all universities seem to have now. At IU, the 24-hour scratch server is a big, common hard-disk area where students all over campus can, at their own risk, save files and projects, which are too big for zipdisks and student lockers, for up to 24 hours. I say "at their own risk" because everything on these scratch servers is viewable by everyone else and is also "throw away-able" by everyone else. At IU, 24-hour scratch is not stable or even reliable, but it sure is interesting in these times of changing copyright.

IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

A few months back I was browsing the 24-hour scratch server early in the morning. (I browse at that time because this is before the IU administrators have had a chance to delete as much questionable material as possible, hopefully preventing IU from getting sued by every media outlet in North America for copyright violations.) It is not unusual to find every song recorded during the 1960s and 70s in a single folder on 24-scratch early in the morning. You have to understand that few students do any homework, most of them don't read, and a lot of them don't even watch TV -- so a good use of an evening is downloading all of Motown. Usually by 9 a.m. the scratch drive is clean and not too interesting -- just term papers and other boring stuff. This day was different. I'm browsing through the scratch, and I see two files named "snatch1" and "snatch2." Now, I'm a guy, so my first thought is that this must be porn, but I noticed that both files were half a gig in size, which means the equivalent of a CD-ROM. I then thought, "This is a lot of porn," so out of manly curiosity I copied the first file to my desktop, which took about 15 minutes because of the size. I clicked on the file to see what I thought was going to be the biggest porn file known to humankind, but I was surprised.

There on my screen on my desktop was Brad Pitt in a funny hat talking really weird. I was thinking how odd it was to have Brad Pitt in a porn movie, and looking so scruffy. What's going on here? Then I realized that he's talking with an Irish accent and there were Chinese subtitles at the bottom of the screen -- and then that I wasn't looking at porn but at the first half of the movie Snatch, which had probably been subtitled for distribution in China. I quickly checked the date on my computer and realized that Snatch had yet to open in Bloomington, Indiana, but that I already had it on my computer. I then went back to 24-hour scratch and downloaded "snatch2" and proceeded to watch interactive high-definition TV a lot sooner than even Dubya might imagine or condone.

I didn't really enjoy watching the movie on my computer because my chair wasn't too comfortable (it's designed for writing articles, not watching HDTV), and I had all these students coming in and saying things like, "Hey, cool. Brad Pitt. Snatch. Saw it last week on Bearshare." The Internet and peer-to-peer technologies give a whole new meaning to the idea of "advance preview."

Most folks have heard of the trials of Napster and its problems with the music industry, but few realize that the big problem isn't so much with the music industry as with the media industry in general. Napster has attracted at least 50 million downloads and has been adopted faster by the general population than NCSA Mosaic (the daddy of Netscape), Hotmail, and even ICQ messaging, (the mommy of AOL Instant Messaging). Napster is aimed at music online, but it is obvious that anything that can be digitized is open game for transport by peer-to-peer technology such as Napster.