Luckily my Literature and the Culture of Cyberspace class has been providing me with plenty to think about along with introducing me to the work of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.  How I’ve gone this long without reading their work astonishes me.

As the semester progresses I find more and more of the readings in my Cyberlit class begin to parallel Second Life.  Love it or hate it, I’m alarmingly indifferent on the matter.  I find the social nature of Second Life immensely interesting but at the same time I can’t get over the wonky control scheme.  I recently wrote a paper for Cyberlit that started off as a discussion of the steps being taken towards immersion in computer games but it quickly dissolved into looking at the feted inner core of Second Life.  I find it ironic that the internet was supposed to be the great equalizer, though the digital divide quickly emerged, yet in Second Life we have another example of the appearance of a class of social elite.  Really, I shouldn’t be surprised since it is called Second Life.

Torrent technology as a means of activism seems farfetched. How can something used to pirate millions of dollars of copyrighted materials across the globe possibly be used as a tool of advocating change? Well, by doing exactly that. Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet so any group that chooses to distribute their information this way would have the potential to reach numbers of people previously unheard of. BitTorrent has played a fundamental part in the Grey Tuesday and later Dean Gray Tuesday protests by serving as the primary form of distribution for these illegal materials.

The seeds for torrent technology (no pun intended) were planted in BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen’s work with MojoNation, a system of encryption by breaking files apart and then storing them. After leaving the failed MojoNation, Cohen began work on a similar technology which would eventually become known as BitTorrent. BitTorrent works by placing some of the file tracking work to a central server (the tracker). The difference between BitTorrent and other p2p programs is that in order to receive files, you have to also share them. The more a file is shared with others and readily available the faster the download. To make better use of available Internet bandwidth BitTorrent downloads different pieces of a file you want simultaneously from multiple computers, solving a common problem with other peer-to-peer download methods: Peers upload at a much slower rate than they download. By downloading multiple pieces at the same time, the overall speed is greatly improved. The more computers involved in the swarm, the faster the file transfer occurs because there are more sources of each piece of the file. This feature could prove crucial to the success of the Gray Tuesday protest.

To call The Grey Album a minor stir on the internet would be selling DJ Danger Mouse dangerously short. The story is as follows, a little known DJ going by the name of DJ Danger Mouse had done the unthinkable by mixing an a cappella cut of rapper Jay-Z’s Black Album with what was largely regarded as one of the best albums of all time, the eponymous Beatles record also known as the White Album. The scene had been set. Only a few units had been released into the arms of retailers before EMI (copyright holder of the White Album) fired a cease and desist order aimed at both Danger Mouse and those that were carrying the album. While nether of the samples by the Beatles or Jay-Z had been authorized, the a cappella Jay-Z album was released with the intention of people creating either remixes or mash-ups with Jay-Z’s lyrics.

With the threat of EMI’s legal team looming large, Downhill Battle stepped forward. Downhill Battle is a grassroots organization with aims to reorganize the record industry to wrestle control back from the monopoly of major labels into the hands of musicians and fans. Downhill Battle would organize an internet protest which would become known as Grey Tuesday. Downhill Battle’s rational for distribution isn’t known but BitTorrent seemed to have all the answers. Hosting all of the files on a central server and directing all requests for the songs would be a Herculean task. Too many requests and the server could go down, rendering the protest inert. Asking the estimated 170 hosts to have each file available would most certainly cripple the host’s individual servers, again, not a practical solution. By allowing BitTorrent to host the torrent file while the hosts linked to the torrent file would distribute the load evenly across everyone with the file. Success! As word spread about the availability of the file, more people would seed, providing a larger pool for those who would download the album later.

Downhill Battle wasn’t the first to organize an e-protest; Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD) continues the tradition of disruptive, non-violent protest pioneered by Henry David Thoreau into the digital age. Who needs hundreds of actual bodies blocking service when you can accomplish the same thing from home on a global scale? ECD was first developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group whose aims are to draw the international eye to the on-going war being waged on the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico. The most common method of virtual sit-in involves a java applet called Flood Net sending an automated reload request every user determined interval otherwise known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

The basis of the protest was the belief that DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album’s use of sampling was fair use and it should be treated in a manner similar to when a song is covered. The folks of Downhill Battle decided rather than stage a virtual sit-in, distribution of Danger Mouse’s work would be the greatest blow to EMI. On 24 February 2004 hundreds of websites hosted the torrent file of the Grey Album for 24 hours, marking one of the first widespread protests by the citizens of the internet to let the major record labels know they refused to allow them to stomp out creativity.

By all measures the protest was deemed a wild success, with an estimated 100,000 copies of The Grey Album/ 1,000,000 tracks entering circulation having been downloaded that day. While the legal threat intensified during the protest, with many participants receiving cease and desist orders, no legal action was taken against Downhill Battle or any of the participants. Thanks to the unique distribution method The Grey Album entered the realm of pop culture and gained monumental popularity, with a glowing review from The New Yorker and garnering Entertainment Weekly’s Best of 2004 award in music.

Downhill Battle was not content to stop at the Grey Tuesday protest; they have since started Banned Music, a project focusing on peer-to-peer collaboration with an aim of making it impossible to ban of sensor music works. They have since gathered the Illegal Art compilation, a compilation featuring tracks by artists that have resulted in landmark legal decisions with regards to sampling, The Double Black Album, a combination of Jay-Z’s Black Album with Metallica’s Black Album, Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds, a remix of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and DJ Danger Mouse’s original troublemaker, The Grey Album, under this banner, all of which are distributed via torrents.

BitTorrent’s hand in this phenomenon didn’t end there. Soon after word of The Grey Album spread, a Jay-Z Construction Set appeared, featuring Jay-Z’s a cappella tracks and the needed software to create mash-up masterpieces. The construction set is distributed via BitTorrent, entering the hands of many. The Double Black and Black-and-Blue albums entered the world thanks to the construction set.

A similar standoff between the recording industry and the internet occurred when mash-up artists Party Ben and team9 came under fire for The American Edit. Party Ben and team9 worked together under the pseudonym Dean Gray to create a tribute to Green Day’s latest album, American Idiot. The American Edit saw an internet only release with no commercial gains in mind. Dean Gray only asked fans who were willing to put forth money, donate to charities Green Day had supported in the past. Despite the lack of monetary gains for any of the involved parties, the American Edit website was shutdown after receiving a cease and desist order from Warner Brothers Records. Not even a plea from Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong could keep the Warner Brothers legal team away. A similar protest entitled Dean Gray Tuesday, a clear reference to DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Tuesday, was staged on 13 December 2005. Hosts on Dean Gray Tuesday offered not only torrents but direct MP3 downloads and zip archives. I can only assume Dean Gray Tuesday was a success due to the coverage in mainstream print media and the ravings of blogs but due to excessive link rot, no results of the protest are available.

Torrent technology has improved by leaps and bounds since its initial inception and the flexibility of its implementation abounds. Would these protests have been as successful without torrents being chosen as the medium for their proliferation? Most certainly, there were issues at stake in these protests that went above and beyond emerging technologies, but BitTorrent certainly proved its mettle by pulling its weight and becoming an effective tool of protest, and serving as a new method of delivery for information and ideas deemed unfit by the greater conglomerates.

As you can probably gather from the ‘About’ page, this blog will play host to my thoughts on digital media culture and the way it plays a role in our lives.

I’m looking to publish a worthwhile essay about once a week, in addition to any interesting articles I may find between postings.  Having said that, look for my first piece sometime this week.