Tuesday, December 25, 2001

don't cry for argentina

just a quick update on a fine and sunny christmas morning in the breakaway bioregion of cascadia.

despite all the gloom and doom floating around it seems as though we might just pull out of this tailspin - the possibility to choose "humanity's option for success" is still very much in play.

Down in Argentina people loot supermarkets and ask who are the real looters - the hungry who will steal to survive, or the men in suits far away who profit from their despair. A week of food riots later, el presidente declares a state of emergency - and a million citizens converge on the palace. The government flees from the roof in helicopters - shades of Saigon, only this time the invading army is composed of pissed-off housewives and office workers, banging pots and pans. The new interim goverment has taken the desperate step of telling the bankers to take a number, and promising to spend the money on food and wages instead. That 's a 132 billion dollar default - and something tells me that argentina's similarly debt-submerged neighbors are going to notice...

And guess what - none of this is making the papers! (at least not around here...) Read all about it on the Indymedia Newswire.

Meanwhile, Terry Jones reminds us that, in war, grammar is the first casualty.

Here in the affluent north, we celebrate a festival of peace and plenty, good will and whatnot - a real functioning gift economy - for a day - in which generosity is socially mandated, .

to all my friends, here's the official potlatch holiday playlist: xmix 2001.

 Saturday, December 8, 2001

let's roll

The music industry passed an historic threshold last week with the debut of MusicNet, the first "approved" internet distribution vehicle for mainstream music, so "buggy" (ZDnet) as to be recommended to "financial masochists" (Wash.Post) only. A recent online poll indicated that the public is emphatically not interested.

So why are they bothering?

It seems difficult to imagine a service more well-engineered to fail. Hmmm... maybe it's sort of like The Producers- they've figured out a way to make *more money* if their service is a flop. Except it won't involve anything as sophisticated as a Mel Brooks plot: by falling spectacularly on their faces, the labels will have a perfect excuse to run crying to the legislature asking for - and getting - even more oppressive and invasive tools to shut down the 'wide open anarchy' of the net. Corporate government, anyone?

How will history remember this time? A new Reichstag Fire, in the aftermath of a judicial coup-d'etat in which an apparent simpleton ascended a new imperial throne.

"The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth." - Hunter S. Thompson

Meanwhile ya can't tell the cluster bombs from the food aid packages - and starving children are being sent candy and plastic. Sick shit, with no end in sight.

 Monday, November 12, 2001

return of the jedi

dark and desperate days - forces are in motion in a writhing murk - which butterfly, one wonders, will seed the hurricane?

the panic and disorientation evident in the first weeks of 'America's New War', has given way to a quiet urgency as every activist or independant thinker measures themselves against the epoch, weighing in on one side or another of the critical inflection points of our accursedly "interesting" time.

protesters from Seattle to Genoa have taken to the streets in a pageant of symbolic gestures. symbolic of what, exactly? a different sort of life? united only in the negative, the "anti-capitalist convergence" needs to start thinking positive.

what sort of world do we want to live in? Why don't we just go ahead and build it. We've got everything we need.

But there's no place to talk about it - the politics of Fear is monopolizing public debate. Terrorism is the ultimate boogie-man, and the ultimate excuse.

not to get all robert-anton-wilson or anything, but doesn't the whole anthrax thing seem just a bit too, you know, perfect - I mean really, "I are a terrorist - you die now" (in crayon?) - whatever guys. Military grade bio-weapons. No suspects. The enemy is everywhere...

With great haste the spooks and creeps have obtained a blanket permission to now indulge their wildest, wettest dreams. The least of which being the permission (they already had the ability) to spy on everyone everywhere, all the time. But so what? Everything important is happening right out in the open anyway.

The question is - who is capable of understanding what's right in front of us - who even wants to think about it.

The "proactive management of perceptions", as pioneered by Joseph Goebbels and refined by modern corporate PR firms, involves telling a simple story endlessly repeated - leaving no gaps in attention for any dirty little secrets to seep through.

For example - witness the narrowly-averted embarrasment of Silvio Berlusconi, a neo-fascist media billionaire who just happens to be prime minister of Italy. His recent pro-war "USA Day" rally was upstaged by a three-fold turnout at a counter-march against the "economical, social, military war". no doubt purely in the interest of patriotism, CNN found it necessary to actually falsify reports about it. (Check it out - the american and italian editions actually have the numbers reversed!)

But despite the best efforts of the supreme oligarchy of corporate newthink, the sacred vessel of knowledge is pretty much of a sieve now - it's pouring out - in an explosion of alternative information sources, telling different stories, drawing different pictures than the one we're supposed to see.

Stay informed - think - make up your own mind.

suggested reading:

Indymedia - independant newswire

Guerrilla News Network - don't miss the videos

ZNet Chomsky, Fisk, Said etc.

Get Your War On seriously fucking funny!

 Thursday, October 18, 2001

die neue aufrichtigkeit

Greetings from the world's coldest rainforest, the world's largest squatter's camp, a million square kilometers of unceded aboriginal land that is neither british nor columbian. The icy downpour (a little early this year!) is in stark contrast to sunny, balmy berlin, city of construction sites, after-after-hours clubs, and international capitol of cool, where we've been hangin with hipster intellectuals till dawn and beyond. (yo homes! respect to neven, mike, pit, erik, and sabine.) The occasion: the Wizards-of-OS 2 conference, an attempt to focus an amorphous worldwide movement which aims to apply the strategies of free software to culture. Did it succeed? I would have to say no - but the lack of answers is more than mitigated by the fact that finally we're asking the right questions.

It starts with noticing that the most outrageous experiment in practical anarchy ever attempted just happens to comprise the leading edge of the most massively and suddenly successful communications medium in history, but that this has so far had little influence on our 'social self-image' as a species, outside a few tech enclaves. Free software "works": can other forms of creative expression evolve which draw from a similar reservoir of seemingly untapped and unlimited resources? If open-ness, the lack of central control, is good for software, is it also good for writing, music, visual or virtual art of any kind? If not, why not?

No solid answers yet; no problem. As usual with these affairs, the important stuff happens in the hallways and interzones, in the randomizing churn of emergent behavour.

Some highlights:

The Sarai project from New Delhi, inspired by the "public domain" waystations on the ancient caravan routes, aiming to create a 'digital sarai' for collaborative, open, and exploratory art and communication. " The free exchange of code, information and cultural products is central to our conception of the digital public domain. That is why we will encourage everyone, scholars, practitioners and citizens at large, to engage and enlarge this domain. For a society like India, where hierarchy, inequality and control influence the production of ideas, a free software culture is worth fighting for."

The life sharing project from Bologna - an anagram of 'file sharing' which extends this idea to it's ultimate limits: making literally everything on their server publicly accessible, a virtual root account for every visitor to their site - including access to all personal email etc - read-only, but wide open all the same. What nerve!

A brief report on the now-defunct Luther Blissett project, a "multiple name" collaborative identity used by a nameless number of individuals for purposes of radical intervention, which overtly connects the 'free software' concept with situationist notions of anti-copyright and cultural insurrection.

And of course Michael Linton's LETS system, an open money project that puts the "eco" back into "economics" by reinventing money as community currency, a simple measurement of value ("imagine running out of inches") backed by the reputation of the issuer. They've been working for about 20 years in a very practical way developing an economic model that has been taken up by communities all over the world - there are thousands of LETS networks, with hundreds of thousands of members. The next step is to connect them all together.

A money system based on reciprocity and reputation may sound familiar to anyone who has been following the debate on artist-friendly micropayment systems on this and other sites over the last year or so - and indeed this idea of a community currency is a very close fit with what we see as an essential democratizing of the world's financial infrastructure. It also begins to approach Todd Boyle's ideas about using shared accounting systems (aka webledgers) to route around banks in our financial dealings with one another. Clearly, we need to start putting these ideas into practice.

And dare we mention the panel on Collaborative Journalism hosted by Erik Moeller of Infoanarchy, featuring Meg Hourihan, late of Blogger.com, and Timothy Lord of Slashdot. On short notice, due to late cancellation, I was offered the opportunity to present a talk on 'reciprocity and gift culture', as a solution to the problem of finding and rewarding high quality and high resonance writing, music or any other cultural product, particularly in the context of p2p networks and ubiquitous access to distribution. Notes to the talk are available here.

Despite occasional lapses into seemingly directionless discourse, WOS 2 was refreshingly free from irony, sarcasm, or smug self-satisfaction. Sept.11 and its aftermath have opened a portal into the hell dimension, a whirling vortex of perpetual warfare that threatens to engulf history and humanity. This adds a certain seriousness to everything we do, and social experiments which tend to oppose this bleak scenario are now being approached with a sense that the time for bullshitting is over - the "new sincerity" is here.

 Friday, September 21, 2001

we have always been at war with eurasia

Despite the admirable restraint shown by our great leaders in not immediately striking out in all directions with guns blazing, the prognosis is not good for long-term solutions to the problem of 'terrorism'. A gathering darkness enshrouds america, as the radical right uses the pretext of this horrific event to advance their vile agenda. Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberston wasted no time in blaming abortionists, the ACLU, and "alternative lifestyles" - it seems that their imaginary friend called "God" is punishing the sinners of America, using the agency of another group of religious wackos. Ignorance is strength, people. Love it or leave it.

All of the new laws that have been carried all-but-unanimously by a trembling legislative branch are going to come back to haunt us. Next up: missile defence shields, universal IDs and biometric monitoring, banning of private, encrypted, and anonymous communications. But if these laws and initiatives were all fully implemented before 9-11, they would have done *nothing* to stop it. Missile defence? All this will do is further enrich the good-old-boy military contractors. Banning crypto? That's like banning 2+2 at this point. The only people who would obey such a law are people who don't understand it. Information can be hidden in anything - secret communications can't be stopped by passing laws. We are about to become the most monitored and policed society ever known, and yet the invisible enemy will barely be inconvenienced.

The greatest weapon is the human mind.

Perhaps the intention is to outlaw this as well; perhaps it's time to take a hard look at what is really going on.

The current islamic fundamentalist movement was incubated by US intelligence agencies, who have trained, armed, and funded creeps like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and countless others, for decades. The by-now familiar story is that religious fanatics were considered to be anti-communist, therefore 'on our side'. But another, equally plausible scenario is that the authoritarian, hierarchical and fundamentalist tendencies on both sides need war in order to perpetuate their own power, and that they have been provoking this very conflict quite deliberately for years.

Few could have expected it to be this big, but anyone who wasn't expecting some kind of terrorist attack was simply not paying attention. When Clinton sent the cruise missiles into that pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, under the pretext that they were making chemical weapons, he blithely advised the American people to expect retaliatory strikes on American soil. (Of course, we'll never know if they actually were making chemical weapons, in addition to most of the antibiotics for sub-saharan Africa - the US blocked a UN investigation into the event.) In recent months the media had stopped even pretending to do anything but demonize the Palestinians, and Israel has instituted a policy of assassination of rebel leaders (along with any unlucky house guests, office workers, or domestic servants in the vicinity.)

Discussing the background to this crisis is an un-subject in the North American media - the rest of the world is scratching their heads in disbelief at the official line, that 18 people killed themselves to destroy the most powerful symbols of America, and as many Americans as possible, because "they hate freedom."

---

here's a ruthless and fairly random cull of recent commentary:

Michael Moore: War on Whom? http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11507

Bush's Faustian Deal with the Taliban: http://www.corpwatch.org/news/2001/0201.html

Charles Platt: the enduring power of stupidity http://politechbot.com/p-02521.html

Why? An attempt to explain the unexplainable (Jane's Security) http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jdw/jdw010914_1_n.shtml

18 guys who shook the world: (Yahoo) http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/uctr/20010920/cm/eighteen_guys_who_shook_the_world_1.html

Electronic Privacy Information Center - special bulletin: http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_8.18.html

---

this is from a few years ago - required reading:

Noam Chomsky: Media Control http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/MediaControl_Chomsky.html

 Wednesday, September 12, 2001

911 emergency

an era has ended abruptly.

an iconic punctuation mark - burned into the american psyche

challenger plus the jfk assassination, times pearl harbour

the shock will subside but the anger will reverberate endlessly. having loved ones killed and sacred symbols desecrated is never forgiven or forgotten, and a righteous wrath craves vengeance.

but wait a minute - that's what the nut cases who pulled this off thought that *they* were doing!

let's say we hit back, hard. replace kabul with a smoking hole - then what? ground war? tactical nukes? megabodies?

malcom x, on hearing of the hit on jfk, remarked that "the chickens have come home to roost."

world war 3 didn't start on sept 11, it's been going on for decades. it just came home.

take a look at this Bin Laden guy - seems he began his career as a CIA shill. oops! sorry, we thought he was just going to blow up russians!

if he's the monster - i wanna know who's dr. frankenstein.

and now we're going to be expected to give more money, power, and a freer hand to this same shadowy "security" establishment, the engineers of our geopolitical nightmare. the pressure will be enormous to give them whatever they want.

"those who sacrifice freedom for security deserver neither" - didn't an american say that?

keep this in mind as all private, anonymous or encrypted communications are outlawed, along with the "anarchy" of the internet.

expect mandatory universal ids, round the clock surveillance, police checkpoints - and anyone who dissents labeled traitor, terrorist.

the enemies of freedom know how to create war. but endless war is not what the world needs right now. this is our chance to stop it - lovers of freedom need to learn how to create peace. maybe our last chance.

 Thursday, September 6, 2001

the age of abundance

- state of the potlatch address -

every year techniques and materials improve, more "wealth" is created, yet the promised leisure society recedes ever further into the distance. increased production has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in waste and destruction. abundance violates the "law" of supply and demand, which decrees that desires must be perpetually stimulated but unfulfilled. economic health is an emotional illness.

but trying to make ideas uncopyable is like making water not wet. computers copy and manipulate information - that's all they're good for. they are not "smart", just relentless. supply is - or could be - exactly equal to demand.

in this environment, scarcity must be maintained artificially, by defying the physics of information. titular owners of ideas are demanding that we sacrifice social progress to their graven images called copyrights, trademarks, patents, and brands.

the regime of scarcity is upheld by illusion and brute force. good cop bad cop. speak softly and carry a big stick. it could be much worse - be reasonable and trust the experts - or else!

but bones keep showing up in the tofu - soylent green is people.

attempting to sieze the controls is futile, we already hit the iceberg. instead of re-arranging the deckchairs, we can start launching the lifeboats any time now. we have the skills, tools and motivation, we just need to identify what needs to be done, and work together to make it happen.

this is what the free software movement is all about, consistent with the underlying physical and logical layer of an open network. which in turn enables and encourages further experimentation with social and productive relationships based on free speech and free beer.

the most mysterious scarcity is an imaginary substance called money. running out of money is like running out of inches - yet we pay dearly for this entirely metaphysical (ac)counting tool. trillions traded daily with no connection to anything useful or productive. money has gone into business for itself.

e-commerce is a failure because the underlying economic structures are at cross-purposes to the real changes taking place. an open network is a commons, agora, gumbo yaya - everybody talks at once. money is information and should flow as easily.

so lets print our own money. no, really.

an international currency that is also a community currency, based on the reciprocity of the gift cycle - in which the emphasis is on each participant making real and valuable contributions into a common pool or fund - of skills, goods, or anything else of value.

it's not necessary to start from scratch - all the important ideas have been around for ages, and most of the hard work has been done already. we just need to put the pieces together. a reliable, decentralized and encrypted distribution system. tools for establishing persistent identities and authentication without needing to rely on any single central authority (ie. point of failure.) local accounting systems linked into a global network.

the forces opposing neo-feudalism aka the corporate agenda have been gaining support and sympathy on the basis of a creative and fundamentally non-violent approach to political protest. but simply registering one's displeasure is not enough - the question is, what are we doing the rest of the time, what kind of life we would live if we had the choice? peaceful protest finds fulfilment in peaceful revolution.

the future of technology is not to be found in business models, but in lifestyle models - new ways of interacting in which technology and productivity is not an end but a means to help us explore our real potential, a life filled with hope and passion and mutual respect, a game anyone can play.

- september 2001, vancouver, coast salish territory -

 Thursday, August 2, 2001

Long hot summer

Ah, summer.

In the lazy days of August, industry moguls are off playing tennis somewhere, laying low while the latest anti-trust threats blow by. The "Big Five" record labels are getting ready to roll out their 'napster-killer' subscription services. (Actually they cheated, Napster was dumped in the canal ages ago...) They're hoping to avoid the obvious charges of conspiring to obtain a stranglehold on an incipient market by leveraging their stranglehold on an existing market - the definition of an illegal trust, and by the greatest of coincidences the very charge that Microsoft is even now weasling out of. The fact that two such formidable mafias intend to have their way with the same market suggest that they have agreed to carve it up - like Hitler and Stalin's plans for Poland, another August long ago.

Putting audio playback straight into the O.S. - locking it into a format that is encrypted right down to the metal - is the only way anyone will ever be able to control copying of audio files - and only then if it locks out every other format. And so the US Government and Judiciary are going to look the other way - not so much over concern for the profits and valuations of the MS-RIAA cabal, but for strategic reasons related to the need to maintain the regime of information-scarcity in the age of ubiqutious computing.

Meanwhile, beyond the palaces of intrigue, roughly one bazillion people have each approximately umpteen gazillion mp3 files on CDs and hard drives, which according to the logic of these consumate strategists will soon be forgotten in the rush to embrace the brave new world of locked content.

The plan is clearly to mutate the computer into something completely different from the "universal machine" that it has been from the beginning, into an "appliance" that allows us to "subscribe" to "services" - all the while pretending that nothing important has changed. Think I'm paranoid? Check out Robert Cringely's report on the death of TCP/IP, Richard Stallman's Harm from the Hague, or Wayne Madsen's analysis of Why "Code Red" is a Red Herring.

What do you call it if they really are out to get us?

 Wednesday, July 25, 2001

free dmitry!

This is Dmitry Sklyarov, with his young family, in a happier moment. He's been cooling his heels in an American prison since July 17, when he was arrested for delivering a paper discussing the woefully shabby "security" in Adobe's "e-book" format, and for producing software which defeats it, in Russia, where one evidently has more actual freedom nowadays than in the USA. This is incredibly galling - even though Adobe has caved in over a threatened boycott and called for Dmitry's release, the FBI isn't showing any signs of letting go, and industry officials and their pet legislators are strutting and high-fiving on the sidelines. Check the Free Sklyarov site for updates.

[ July 30: Lawrence Lessig has an Op-Ed piece in the ny times - Jail Time in the Digital Age ]
[ July 31: Jon Katz hits a rare bullseye with Earth to Media: This kid is still in jail on /.]

The message is clear: bad technology, in the service of corporate profits, is now under police protection. Just because you can write code on that fancy-pants computer of yours, don't assume you're gonna be allowed to. After all, if our beloved corporate lordships can't wrap their heads around what the internet actually is, then they're going to have to change it into something that they can understand. You know - tightly controlled, heavily patrolled just like everything and everywhere else.

Unfortunately for him and his family, Dmitry Sklyarov's case has taken on a symbolic character - he's now a pawn in a very boring - and very deadly - game of power. Carlo Guiliani is another sort of pawn, the first anarchist martyr of the "digital millenium". The issues here are actually closely related - it's about the right of a few wealthy, ruthless, private interests to shape and define our economy, our society, and our collective future as a species.

The word on the street is: fuck that shit.

That's what the protesters "said" in Genoa - and that's what millions of music fans are saying by jumping onto a thousand different trading networks, and giving the bird to RIAA. Democracy means the people rule - governments and corporations exist at our convenience and discretion, not the other way round. Seems some people have forgotten this.

The simplest and most effective method of achieving social change is massive non-violent non-compliance: not just civil but civilized disobediance (eg. a general strike). If supported by a majority of citizens, it's pretty much unstoppable. The "protest tour" that has been making the rounds since Seattle is overwhelmingly composed of earnest and sincere individuals with a fundamentally non-violent and anti-hierarchical agenda. And they are clearly gaining supporters - largely by default, as as the world's elites, no longer under any restraint, indulge their penchant for unvarnished power grabs.

The simplest and most effective method for attacking a non-violent, popular movement is from within, by infiltrating and, where necessary, inventing organized groups, then provoking violent actions which in turn creates dissension and fraternal squabbles. This weakens the ensemble at the exact moment as it triggers the repression, and generally helps to obfuscate the actual issues. Can you spell COINTELPRO?

Many of the eyewitness accounts on the IMC Newswire suggest that the core of the "black bloc" activists are garden-variety agents-provocateurs - in any case a very healthy debate on tactics is currently underway.

For a good overview of IMC reporting on the G8 protests, see GENOA G8: What happened?. Of special interest is an explanation of What the protesters in genoa want[ed] by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Possibly the most disturbing event was the storming of the temporary headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum, in which sleeping and defenceless activists were savagely beaten by Italian police - supposedly in reprisal for the "black bloc" trashing of a residential quarter, when it was well known that the black bloc were staying in a car park three miles away, where they remained unmolested. Clearly fascism is on the rise, and not only in Italy.

 Tuesday, July 10, 2001

the potlatch paradigm

Hobbits give presents to other people on their own birthdays.... every day in the year was somebody's birthday, so that every hobbit in those parts had a fair chance of at least one present at least once a week.

Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

greetings potlatch partisans.

It's been some time since this site was updated, apologies to all and sundry. Things have been moving forward on multiple fronts nonetheless.

Let's begin with a quick recap. This site is intended to be a resource for information and advocacy in support of a new economic system based on the theory and practice of the gift. Known by various names - voluntary payments, tipping, donations, patronage - we've adopted the term "potlatch" for several reasons.

First - it's accurate, it means exactly what we are attempting to describe. The word itself is native american, from the Chinook trading language, a fact in itself consistent with our goals: chinook was spoken not by any single tribe, but by members of all tribes from California to Alaska, from the pacific to the rocky mountains and beyond. (In the western plains the term 'chinook' means a warm winter wind that occasionally crosses through the mountain passes.) 'Potlatch' means 'to give', and by extension the entire social and economic system of these tribes. It also conveys a sense of the reciprocal imperitive of any gift economy - the eternal return and circulation of the gift is the glue that holds human societies together.

Second - the term is unburdened with unpleasant or misleading connotations. It is not widely known or used, which makes it less likely to lead to mistaken impressions. Our intention is to develop a common framework and vocabulary for discussing this nascent and as yet formless movement - to draw together related trends and tendencies, plans, plots, schemes and strategies, to help these similar movements to see themselves in the context of a larger movement that encompasses them all.

the potlatch paradigm

Human history is strewn with abandoned ideas, doctrines, and articles of faith. The historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn suggested that the development of human knowledge and associated social structures took place not in an unbroken process of advancement, but unevenly, discontinuously, through a series of revolutions which altered the framework or context in which ideas could be presented and understood. He referred to this over-arching architecture within which social and intellectual discourse takes place as a paradigm, a fundamental set of shared assumptions, an idea-map that makes communication possible. Most importantly, he pointed out that these maps tend not to evolve over time, but rather to be replaced periodically with new maps: defenders of a dominant paradigm seldom change their minds, but simply become irrelevant. They grow old and die, leaving a new generation to take a new approach.

Human beings, grappling with a chaotic "Rorschach" reality, create pictures in our minds, and tell ourselves stories to make sense of what we perceive. Social cohesion is enabled by a basic agreement about what we are looking at. But in the endless flux of matter in motion, and especially with the accelerated pace of discovery and invention, reality simply will not sit still for a portrait. An older generation will continue to "see" a picture long after it has become indistinct to their heirs - after a time, we connect the dots and form a new picture, a new pattern, and reorient our activities around it.

It is in this context that we view the Potlatch, as a rising paradigm destined to overtake the doctrine of enforced scarcity - a unifying principle within which a wide range of ideas and initiatives may be seen to be related and mutually-reinforcing. Please note: we're not trying to create a brand or a marketing category - it's not a business model but a lifestyle model. It's not about altruism but mutually beneficial behaviour, the only truly rational self interest on a fragile and fast-shrinking planet.

end game for the internet?

A very chilly wind is blowing from Redmond these days, in the wake of the US Court of Appeals apparently letting them walk for the assisted-suicide of Netscape and Java. The message is clear: the forces in favour of a monitored, metered, and centralized internet have had to admit that their best shot at reining in the runaway horse is Windows' 90+% market share in operating systems. By leaving Jackson's findings of fact untouched (ie that MS is an illegal and predatory monopoly) but voiding the breakup order, they have essentially placed a choke-collar on the pitbull while allowing it to continue to terrorize the neighborhood children.

Just look at the breadth of initiatives announced by this recalcitrant criminal organization: they seem hell-bent on using their Windows crowbar to force their way into every cupboard. It's not enough for them to own the desktop, web browser, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, email - they want to control media playback, "presence" and messaging, authentication (=on-line purchasing) - the list goes on and on. Supposedly, this is OK because we have AOL to counterbalance their power - excuse me while I projectile vomit. AOL is just as allergic to the freedom and decentralization of the "real" internet as MS is - it's a classic pincer movement, intended to encircle and subdue all of those pesky independants.

And the offensive (pun intended) continues with yesterday's announced pact with Verisign in which the two most sinister entities on the net declare their intentions to consummate an unholy alliance. The truly scary part of all this is that the average citizen, even the average internet user, is pretty much completely unaware that it's even happening.

 Wednesday, June 27, 2001

reinventing micropayments revisited

Seems like Scott McCloud walked into a bit of a hornet's nest over his latest micropayment manifesto, exemplified by this wickedly sarcastic parody. The complaint? Apparently, he is rhapsodizing something that doesn't actually exist (yet) - and we wouldn't want our creative types advancing crazy theories and getting our hopes up now would we. Scott's rebuttal to the pitchfork-wielding villagers is here.

This idea just won't go away. Culture on the internet circa 2001 is supported by advertising - which IMHO is a pollution of culture - or it is simply not supported. There is as yet no plausible migration path to a direct-support model (aka distributed patronage, micro-subscription.) The direct-payment system that MS and the various **AA media cartels are preparing to unleash is an unvarnished power-grab, in which all the important decisions are made ahead of time - a re-capitulation of strong-arming for "shelf-space" - in which only approved content gets exposure, and all revenue is swallowed into a vortex of occult accounting.

This process is being chronicled on the End of Free weblog, a sort of a "fuckedcompany" for free content and services on the internet, created by Evan Williams of Blogger fame. Interesting, and reflects the ambivalence most of us down in the trenches are feeling these days toward the "freedom" of the web. The problem seems obvious - running a website involves a unilateral gift to one's users, with no technical or cultural framework in place to encourage or enable reciprocation. The way to retain "freedom" while at the same time avoiding a lemming-leap into bankruptcy must be to establish a method and motive for fans, users, audiences and the like to "freely" give something in return.

Trying to force people to pay won't work! Take a good look at the formerly fanatically popular Napster as it craters due to it's immanent switch-over to an enforced payment model. How to go from 70 million users to 7000 in one easy step...

 Sunday, June 17, 2001

re-inventing micropayments

More geological slippage toward the potlatch economy.

Scott McCloud does it again with Coins of the Realm, part two, his analysis of the "file-sharing" phenomenon and its pertinence to independant creators, demonstrating once again the necessity of an easy-to-use and low-overhead micropayment system for the internet.

The need has never been clearer for a "virtual coinslot" application which can be used to make small payments to creators - why don't we have this already? The problem is one of trust and authentication, and protecting such a system against abuse. We had better get on with the job of building it, however, starting with "the best we can do at the moment", moving toward "good enough" as time goes by. If not, Microsoft is going to own it:

Nicholas Petreley: MS masters NC mind-set (Infoworld, via /.) "WAKE UP, open-source community. The battle is not for the desktop; it is not for the server; it is not for the operating system; it is not for the development environment; it is not about the GNU General Public License (GPL) vs. Microsoft's business model. The battle is primarily about who will control user-authentication services."

The idea quite simply is that we will all have to go through them to conduct any "secure" activity - this from the company that brought you "I Love You" and the Melissa Virus - but more than this: not only will they have access to a vast amount of your information, they'll own it, and charge you to have access to it.

So, that's it for the Anti-trust action? Was there a wrist-slap in there or have they just been given the green light to lock up every square inch of the computing landscape? Anti-christ action is more like it. That line about not being able to buy or sell without accepting the mark of the beast is starting to sound all too plausible.

Then there's The Man Who Bought the Internet. If I had to pick just one, I would say this is most sinister development on the net lately. But don't take my word for it: see the movie.

Our proposal? What we've been proposing all along: an open-source micropayment system. The only way we're going to avoid having Big Brother Inc. control the future of human commerce and culture is to apply the principles of the Free Software movement to these areas. We need the virtual coinslot to be free for anyone to use, or at least not monopolized by self-appointed toll collectors. We also feel pretty strongly that such a system has no hope of catching on unless its use is voluntary. ie. jane average websurfer is guaranteed to high-tail it outta there at the first whiff of "please pay money in order to continue" vibes. On the other hand, a small floating window with a tiny "click here to pay" button might meet with modest success, assuming the aforementioned security concerns can be addressed, and a "karma points" feedback is in place to reward or at least recognize contributors.

Thanks to Zooko and others for pointing out that security is impossible without a very specific sense of what one is attempting to secure against. Stripped to essentials, a payment system that does what we need it to do has the following features: an easy, cloneable and skinnable interface with a standard "control set"; a messaging layer to transmit payment information from one party to another; and some kind of database in which each participant has a "ledger", and within which accounts can be settled. The system needs to be secured against malicious parties destroying or modifying data at any of these three layers. I'm going to assume that, for my purposes, having a single database controlled by Microsoft is not a solution to this problem - in fact it is the problem.

If we don't want to "outsource" our authentication, verification, and reputation systems (eg. MS, Verisign), what are our alternatives? It seems that some variation of the PGP "web of trust" model is the most likely way to establish networks in which we can build up trusted relationships without requiring a central authority to broker or mediate these relationships. In practice we think that this amounts to having an arbitrary number of locally trusted subnetworks (consisting of individuals that can verify one another in meat-space) which overlap with one another, to provide gateways from one "cell" to another.

We have some specific ideas about how these three layers might be implemented, the most important principle of which is to not re-invent the wheel. It's likely that all the hard and important parts of this system already exist in various Free Software skunkworks around the net. The crucial effort right now is to bring these pieces together will all possible dispatch.

 Monday, June 11, 2001

public privacy

High-Tech Devices Require a Warrant (Washington Post)

"In a case pitting constitutional privacy protections crafted in the 18th century against the intrusive power of modern technology, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that police must obtain a search warrant before using high-tech devices to gather information from inside a private home."

This re-affirms that, for now at least, americans retain the right to not be observed in their own homes or other private spaces. Of course nowadays many people are conducting more and more of their private business, and private lives generally, on computer networks. Surely it needs to be established that identical rights to privacy apply, that is to say, we have the right to create and populate private spaces online.

This translates to the right to create encrypted networks within which activities cannot be observed - the software equivalent of closing the curtains. Governments of the world are trying to get us used to the idea that we need to give them the power to decide who and what is allowed to be private, which in practice would mean that we have to show them everything, and then let them decide what they will look at. Not very reassuring somehow. The point is that if privacy is to have any meaning, it has to be defined at the level of individuals, with each of us in control of what we wish to reveal to whom.

Now this right is of no practical importance if we are compelled to conduct all of our activities in "public" space, ie. in plain view of anyone who wishes to observe us, which is basically the situation we have with the internet circa 2001. It's inconvenient and difficult to communicate in anything resembling a secure fashion. Sure, I could use PGP or another encryption system to scramble my email, but unless everyone I correspond with is using the same system, I won't be doing much communicating. By throwing all manner of legal obstacles, throughout the 90s, in the path of those attempting to bring secure communications to the masses, the "crypto-monopolists" have succeeded in blocking the establishment of a standard, even if they have failed to block the technology itself. It's no accident that the only real mainstream use of encryption is the SSL module in web browsers, which features an authentication system controlled by a single, centralized authority. Which also just happens to be the same central authority that controls the vast majority of domain names - surely a great convenience for those wishing to assure themselves the ability to apply broad pressures by precise application of influence.

Antithetical to such centralizing effects is the general trend toward autonomy and self-organization at the periphery of the network. With the demise of Napster, file-sharing has returned to it's historical role as just such an edge-phenomenon, carried out among relatively small groups of peers without central coordination. As the shrill protestations of the copyright-cartels (RIAA/MPAA) increase in pitch and volume, we can expect to see a massive effort to further marginalize and criminalize this very popular activity. And in fact we can see that the effort is already beginning to bear fruit, both in increased police powers, and in the willingness of certain large software and hardware companies - themselves potential beneficiaries of increasing centralization - to build so-called "rights management" - aka copy protection - into hard-drives, operating systems, etc.

The question is, does the average user want such restrictions built in to systems which they pay for? Actually that's too easy, because the answer is obviously no. More precisely - will the average user put up with such restrictions? This is only slightly harder to answer - it will depend on what alternatives are available, and the alternatives would appear to be multiplying. Until recently, it hasn't been too much of a priority for the hoi polloi of software developers to worry much about issues of privacy or anonymity. But the more pressure is put on developers of certain types of software, eg. anything that enables users to move files around the internet, the more they are forced to consider such matters. And so there are literally dozens of projects under way which are exploring different methods of making communications unobservable to outside parties. And in this case, communication means any type of information transfer whatsoever.

The copyright cops are surely going to cry foul if any of these systems find a mass-market user base - after all, any such general-purpose facillity for anonymous or unobservable information transfer is certain to be used for unauthorized duplication of copyrighted works. The pressure will be fierce to ban such systems outright - anything less will be admitting defeat, something the Jack Valentis of this world are loathe to do. (Mr. Valenti, if one recalls, is the motion-picture industy mouthpiece who once compared home-video technology to the Boston Strangler, while cheerleading a long and bitter lawsuit attempting to block the introduction of the Sony Betamax. 20 years later, video sales and rentals account for a large percentage of revenues for this same industry, which may give us a small insight into the ability of those propagating the current hysteria to understand the value of technical innovation.)

There is much more at stake here than the profits of a few corporations, or for that matter, industries. As Lawrence Lessig forcefully presents it in his landmark work "Code", we're in the process of defining the architecture of social space in the 21st Century. This architecture remains mutable, unfixed, but two very different and opposing structures are taking shape. The first, receiving the overwhelming support of corporations and governments, presents a vision of computer networks, and by extension society, as a space in which activities must be specifically allowed by central agencies or authorities, and which must therefore be effectively monitored in minute detail by these agencies or their representatives, to ensure that no "forbidden" activities take place there. The second potential architecture inverts this situation, and, following the dictum that we should all be considered innocent until proven guilty, places primary importance on the necessity to defend individual rights against tyrannical, autocratic elements, which throughout history have shown a willingness to sacrifice public welfare for private gain.

We're only going to get one shot at this. Right now pretty much every interest group that wields any sort of power is striving to use its influence to extend that power. A confluence of such interests has been re-writing the legislative "code" in their favour, perhaps most significantly through the advancement of over-arching "trade agreements" which reduce the power of local, elected and (theoretically) accountable bodies, in favour of international, self-appointed and secretive associations of the wealthy and powerful. It's hard to over-state this issue. Laws and rights mean nothing if they can be re-written or re-interpreted at the behest of the highest bidder. Given that nearly every major political party, and nearly every news source, is controlled by the same interests, the prognosis seems dire indeed for any organized effort hoping to stop this impending juggernaut.

Enter the un-organized effort. Our only defence against the formation of a thousand-year corporate reich is for ordinary citizens to define for themselves the measure of their own freedom and their own happiness, and evolve strategies and tactics which correspond to these ideals. Of prime importance is the other half of Lessig's "code is law" formula - the software code which defines in practice what we can and cannot do in the new social space embodied by what we now refer to as the internet. And in this sphere, individuals can and do make a difference, both by writing software which reinforces individual powers and liberties, and by establishing cultures in which the use of such tools becomes the de facto standard, the social norm.

The corporate wet dream of a "perfect" metered and monitored public network is destined to be undone by the development and popularization of tools which allow us to "close the curtains" against such processes. Raw network resources will of course be metered in various ways, but any actual activity which takes place within will be discernable only to those who are directly involved. An interesting experiment in social evolution is about to begin on this basis, in which individuals build up organic groupings or "webs of trust" within these unobservable spaces. We can only guess what the free societies of the future might look like, but there is every likelihood that their core institutions will come into being indirectly, as emergent properties of systems being built, with more modest goals, today.

So, have at it kiddies! Try them all: Gnutella, MojoNation, Freenet, and whatever else you might discover that puts control in the hands of individuals, and takes it away from central authorities, bureaucracies, and corporate rent-collectors. If you lack the time or skill to help code or create these embryonic institutions, you can still contribute in a crucial way, by making them a part of your everyday life. Just say no to neo-feudalism.

 Monday, May 28, 2001

patently absurd

Does the recent reversal of a lower-court decision to stop publication of "The Wind Done Gone" suggest a sudden thaw in the cold war being waged against traditionally acknowledged 'fair use' rights?

Not bloody likely. The struggle over so-called 'intellectual property' promises to be a protracted siege. Question is, who's besieging whom?

Entrenched economic and political interests hold the crossroads, the airstrips, and the transmission towers. Insurgent forces operate with impunity almost everywhere else. There's a maze of tunnels under every stronghold, and sympathetic agents in every enterprise.

OK, I'll lose the Vietnam analogy, but not before pointing out that this time it's not a backward and badly outnumbered country that's in revolt, but the most technically advanced strata of all countries - millions of the smartest people on the planet.

For a "serious" treatment of some of the issues, see the Eldred vs Reno page at Harvard Law School's OpenLaw site. OpenLaw is a project intended to adapt the "bazaar" model of Free Software development to legal research and opinion. They're involved in the Microsoft antitrust suit, the 2600/DeCSS case, and others. Eldred vs Reno is a constitutional challenge to the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act" of 1998 (passed by anonymous voice vote under cover of the Lewinsky scandal) which extended the term of copyright, retroactively for another 20 years.

(For a more sarcastic viewpoint, see Becoming Digital at suck.com)

Copyright was intended to stimulate creative activity - it's defenders will argue that this is why we still need it, and even why we need to strengthen it. How exactly extending the copyright on Mickey Mouse has encouraged more creative activity in the 1920s is a mystery too deep to fathom. Anyway, it's clear that the original intent of copyright has become a rather threadbare garment stretched to the point of obscenity over the obesity that is "the content industry" circa 2001.

Everything related to this domain of abstract property rights is being sucked into a spiralling conflict between the original intent (and constitutional basis) of these rights, which is to create a balance between public and private interests; and the current practices which tend to eliminate the public half of the equation. Lawrence Lessig stated this clearly in his somewhat incendiary keynote at the o'reilly p2p conference:

"So the framers of our constitution created a copyright, for example, whose initial term was 14 years. Our current term is the life of the author plus 70 years. For Irving Berlin, 140 years for his most important work. The framers of our constitution established a copyright that protected against the re-publication of maps, charts and books. Re-publication, not against derivative use, not against translation, not against adapting it for a play. Not against any of those uses. Very narrow protection. A very narrow regulation of a tiny bit of the American economy.

Now over time, this government-backed monopoly has exploded. The term has exploded, the scope has exploded, and now any use of creative work in some re-engineered way is arguably a copyright violation. [....]

So this law, originally intended to apply to a small portion of the American economy, now applies to absolutely everybody in absolutely anything they do in the context of the online world. Cyberspace has made us all subject to this regulation. And the fundamental question we need to re-ask is: is the scope of this regulation sensible? Does it make sense to order the ability of people to be creative to other's speech in this way that requires you get a license first before you do anything? That you get the power as a copyright holder to control use perfectly? To perfectly control how copyright works get used? Does the framers' conception of a limited monopoly translate into this extraordinarily powerful ability to control the use and distribution of content?"

(full transcript here)

Free Software guru Richard Stallman made a similar point during a session entitled Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks as part of the Media in Transition project at MIT: "...copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is now a Draconian restriction on a general public.  It used to be a restriction on publishers for the sake of authors.  Now, for practical purposes, it's a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers. "

These two luminaries are standard bearers in the first rank of a movement which aims to broaden and strengthen an intellectual and "informational" commons. This movement doesn't even have a name yet, but you can see its diverse influence in the negative, in all the forces that are martialing to attack it. The music industry, apparently fragmenting and faltering a short time ago, has closed ranks and crushed or absorbed all of its most celebrated adversaries in rapid succession. Plans are underway to place copy-protection into hard drives, serial buses, BIOSes, and of course operating systems, in a monumental effort to "make water not wet." (Bruce Schneier) Of course, simply having such systems in place will not be enough - the public has to be convinced to use them. In other words, the Napster generation has to be convinced that paying money for music that can't be copied is better than not paying for music that can be copied, an outcome that is inconceivable in the presence of a single viable alternative. Therefore, these alternatives must be stamped out - RIAA hench-woman Hilary Rosen smugly asserts that "unless we approve, your ideas will not be permitted."

But really she's just whistling in the dark. The fact is, there is no way Hilary Rosen or Edgar Bronfman Jr. or Jack Fucking Valenti can stop what is already happening everywhere. It's not about venture capital or spin control, it's about mind share of the young and brilliant. Hilary might as well be commanding the sun to stop dead in the sky for all the effect it's going to have on the kids, coders, and creators who are not waiting for someone to grant them freedom, but are just going ahead and taking it.

 Saturday, May 5, 2001

revolution is the ecstasy of history

the defining spirit and style of any era always announces itself in a gesture which sweeps away the decaying remnants of an era at its end. There is always a period in which those whose loyalties and livelihoods are threatened will violently, or deviously, denounce this spirit and this style. The skills and resources of the defenders of the old may delay the acceptance of the new, but by the time the fight breaks out into the open, the real battle is already over.

Microsoft is training its guns on the "open source" software movement - in itself a validation of not just the goals and ideals, but the actual success of this movement. If MS wasn't pissing their pants, they would simply continue to ignore it. Now they're getting pro-active, and it's an interesting exercise in media de-construction to distill the essence of their argument, which is that free software is a threat to profit and, by extension, the american economy and way of life. The significance of this "papal bull" is it's subtext and assumptions, the subliminal message it sends to friend and foe.

Reading the news these days is like reading Pravda in the bad old days of the cold war - you've got to read between the lines, with night-vision goggles, to really get the story. For instance, the news-byte that I caught quoted Mundie revealing that free software "...has inherent security risks and can force intellectual property into the public domain" (deadpan, without rebuttal) and offered Microsoft's solution to all this "discredited" dot-communism, a new software philosophy called "shared source."

This is eerily reminiscent of the "shared use" propaganda campaign waged by the lumber industry here in BC for the last 10 years or so, under the auspices of a "grassroots" movement manufactured-to-order for the purpose. (Courtesy of Burson-Marstellar, the world's largest PR firm, specialists in "the proactive management of perceptions.") Probably just a coincidence, and yet the outline of a general strategic alliance of corporatization seems to be coming into focus. For example, the above-mentioned anti-environmentalist campaign parallels in many ways the battles being waged by the major media companies over digital distribution - industrial cartels justifying their dubious practices with the argument that their workers need to eat and to have a roof over their heads.

One needn't posit an all-encompassing conspiracy to notice that similar ends find similar means, on this shrinking planet, as all global cultures merge into the great melting-pot of money. The fact is, every aspirant to power and influence is very interested in the science of perception management, which by it's very nature must remain somewhat occluded - pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Because at the end of the day, perception is what it's all about. To control this, one needs to control not just what people see, but how they interpret what they see. Centralized media organs like daily newspapers and television lend themselves well to this process; there's only a few of them, they're all owned by the wealthy and powerful, and naturally inclined to represent the interests of wealth and power.

The internet tends to undermine this control, by routing-around these perception-management zones, which is why the 'old media' has sustained a hypnotic mantra of the net as a haven for hackers, terrorists, pornographers and pirates - a relentless "air war" designed to soften up the high ground controlled by the info-guerrillas. Lately the invective has gone up a notch - check out the Hands Off Our Kids initiative, for example, designed to thwart nefarious elements who "...use privacy sites on the Internet to anonymously contact one another and recruit our children. Then, using the environment or other worthwhile causes, they manipulate juveniles into committing crimes to further their own cause." Still, despite these valiant efforts, it's not working very well, so far - we can expect to see a "major terrorist incident" blamed on the "unregulated anarchy" of the net any time now, a Reichstag Fire of the information age, to be used as a pretext to abolish what remains of fair use, free speech, and anonymity on-line.

Whether or not such an extremity comes to pass, the wagons of the world's elite are circling against what may be the only threat to a blissful millenium of unchecked power for the "owning classes," beneficiaries of a neo-feudal system of abstract, eternal, state-backed "property rights." Despite the formidable arsenal at their disposal, the threat is proving to be strangely ephemeral and mercurial, a vague and and inconsistent movement of "autonomous zones", affinity groups, and spontaneous alliances. The once powerful weapons of manufactured consent are beginning to seem inadequate to the task of convincing computer users to give up freedoms that have already been taken for granted - specifically the freedom to copy whateverthefuck they want to copy, and to share files with whomever they wish. These may be termed "natural rights" - rights granted by nature in the evolution of hands and minds, to pick a fruit and eat it, to find a stone and sharpen it. The essence of information, its ability to multiply in all directions without being diminished, creates a natural right to avail ourselves of its bounty.

And so independently, in all corners of the globe, small bands of dissidents are working on a common project with no organization whatsoever, only a more-or-less consistent desire to not suck, by building and using tools that promote generosity, self reliance, and open communication. This is a rudimentary toolkit destined to evolve into something we all share, forever, like language and opposable thumbs. Eventually, all "public" information will be available instantly to anyone - duh! To imagine that technology and human nature can be constrained forever within a grid of entrenched rights, in which every square belongs to an absentee landlord, is the height of hubris and folly. From the point of view of the corporate imperitive of "maximizing shareholder value", the abundance and ubiquity of information is a terrible scourge to be feared and hated. But more and more of us are coming to recognize that this position is in fact insane - an unlimited supply of a good thing is a good thing and no amount of FUD-mongering is going to change this fact.

"first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you..." (you are here) "...then you win."

 Friday, April 20, 2001

Intel to Freenet: "I am your father..."

A rather low-key leak/announcement last week revealed that Intel Corp. has taken a 40% stake in Uprizer, Inc, Freenet founder Ian Clarke's top-secret LA-based startup. Apparently, the plan is to adapt the basic technology of Freenet to create a proprietary forward-caching network, a peer-to-peer version of broadband delivery service Akamai.

Now, far be it from me to quibble with anyone for accepting millions of dollars from whomever is offering - fame and fortune come knocking only rarely, especially in this tough post-bubble ecosystem. Nonetheless we find it somewhat unsettling, for the following reason.

Freenet, and it's evil twin, Mojo Nation, are leading the way towards a decentralized, private, anonymous, attack-resistant infrastructure for a next-generation internet. Freenet's declared purpose is to provide a technical foundation for free speech, a censor-proof medium for propogating ideas which may be unpopular and/or illegal. In the process, the developers have created a general-purpose distribution system for any type of digital product - including of course copyrighted works. Likewise, Mojo Nation features a highly scalable and decentralized architecture, that doesn't particularly care what it's distributing. (There's plenty of others.)

Networks such as these will be useful for all sorts of "legitimate" purposes. Anyone who has experimented with icecast or a similar streaming audio server has noticed that popularity quickly becomes expensive. A ubiquitous decentralised "holographic" storage system would allow any internet radio broadcast to send a single stream "into the cloud" and keep bandwidth costs to a minimum, sharing these costs more-or-less equally over the whole network. These systems are beginning to make good on their promises; usability and stability are fast approaching a threshold at which they will be accessible to a mainstream market. For example, the recently announced FreeWeb client is an attempt to provide a familiar interface for browsing and publishing in Freenet.

Now that Napster has finally announced a filtering system that might actually work, we can presume they will be rolling out their paid subscription service any time now. And when they do an exodus of refugees will begin exploring alternative means to find the mainstream music they crave. Inevitably a certain number of these people will be drawn to Freenet and MN.

And herein lies the problem: if these systems have no perceived value other than this, they are in grave danger of being found to be without the "substantial non-infringing" (read: legal) use, that will be necessary to prevent them from being banned outright, at the behest of the all-powerful media cartels. "Free" music (ie. music for which the copyright owners have granted free distribution rights) will be available on "Napster-Classic" and on the plain old Web - why would anyone need anything else?

Intel's initiative in taking the advanced technology of Freenet and using it to build a proprietary network, presumbly married to a "digital rights management" scheme, does not in itself invalidate the efforts of those trying to use the same technology to build a non-proprietary network without such restrictive measures. But it does tend to call into question the necessity of an unrestrictive system - and to provide leverage and ammunition for a general attack on any and all means of "promiscuous" networking.

It's not an idle threat. Abstract property rights, including so-called "intellectual" property rights, are at the center of a struggle for control of the "digital millenium." These rights are no more natural than the feudal privileges which prefigured them - they're entirely a product of habits, customs, and laws - and, of course, enforcement. Those who have written these laws (or lobbied successfully to influence their wording and intent, which is the same thing) are certainly going to avail themselves of every advantage that they have thereby gained. The legal assaults on DeCSS, Napster, et al amount to the first skirmish of what is shaping up to be the defining social conflict of the 21st Century.

The signs of this are everywhere - patents, copyrights, trademarks, and brands stand in the same relation to our era as silver and gold, or coal and steel, once did. And these "rights" are being defended just as bitterly as their predecessors ever were. And extended into every area of life, to the point of surrealism at times. For instance, the recent court ruling against the publication of a satirical sequel to american epic "Gone With the Wind"; or the ongoing suppression of academic papers concerning the music industry's failed SDMI copy protection scheme. Free speech, what's that? And how about the battles raging in places like Brazil and South Africa over production of generic AIDS drugs by local manufacturers, violating the rights of multinational drug companies to get filthy rich off of the most terrible plague since the black death.

And hey - how about those trade talks? Wonder what they were talking about behind all those cops?

Maybe this is just me being paranoid - I hope so, but lately I feel like a real amateur in the paranoia department. My mind refuses to consider what mayhem is possible with a creep like GW Bush in the white house. I'd rather look at the positive side to all this bullshit, all the smart kids with clear eyes and bright smiles who are not buying it - all the lines being drawn, and the questions being asked, on the internet and in the streets.

 Thursday, April 12, 2001

Et tu, Bertelsmann...

Napster is going down like Rasputin, but it is surely going down. The thousand pinpricks method is taking too long, so expect a head shot and a cement overcoat any time now. Judge Patel is losing her patience with Napster's self-policing 'efforts' and even über-label Bertelsmann SA, their one friend inside the RIAA compound has apparently turned against them.

Despite last weeks Senate hearings at which many participants demanded that the government force the major labels into some kind of compulsory licencing scheme, and all sorts of vague announcements about subscription services, there doesn't seem to be any real progress being made. Its obvious that the major media corporations are still totally committed to the "end-to-end encryption" approach - the fantasy that copy-protection will be the cornerstone of their empire in the "digital millenium."

An article in the Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is going to use it's OS monopoly to "wean users off of MP3" by restricting the quality of MP3 rips that it's built-in software can produce. The idea is to make it sound like "somebody in a phone booth underwater," in order to steer unsuspecting users toward Microsoft's own WMF files, which will sound better (than 56k mp3), and have other features like, umm, the inability to copy or trade them, and, umm, expiry dates - kewl!

Salient quote: "The consumer is going to eat what he's given."

It seems that all the big players - tech, media, government - agree that ubiquitous copying and distribution of cultural products is (in the words of a liquid audio spokesman, from the above article) "a big mess to clean up." How strange then that the vast majority of their customers think that they're in heaven with this stuff.

Hmm... there's something familiar about this general attitude. In Québec City next week corporate leaders from North & South America will meet to discuss a new 'super-government' body, the FTAA. They will be meeting behind 6 miles of fencing, protected by 70,000 cops, while they discuss a secret text which will have greater significance, and ultimately more authority, than any enacted law or regulation that might be passed by officials who are actually elected. This democracy thing is obviously just another mess that needs to be cleaned up.

A few people at the top of the pyramid are doing their best to ensure that the many at the base of the pyramid stay in formation - it wouldn't be much of a pyramid without them. Down here at the bottom, we can see daylight streaming in through gaping holes all around, and the loudspeakers keep blaring, "nothing has changed - you will work, you will buy, you will die." But there's nothing but the increasingly shallow lie of our own powerlessness to stop us from putting down our picks and shovels and walking out into the sunshine...

 Tuesday, April 3, 2001

FairShare x2

Back on the top side of the planet - and recovered from the double whammy of jet lag and climate shock.

Catching up on a few developments, in particular a couple of initiatives, both closely related to the general theme of potlatch economies, and both with the same name: FairShare. Another historical oddity and irony, curiouser and curiouser...

FairShare the first showed up on Advogato on March 19: FairShare: Stopping the File Sharing Madness

"Imagine a new kind of file sharing system - let's call it FairShare. When you run FairShare, you get a little search box and you can type in the name of a song or artist, and it'll hunt it down for you. Nothing new there.

What's different is the type of file that's returned. If you search for a song, you still get an MP3, but digitally signed with a secure certificate from a trusted authority. Because it's signed, you know you're getting the content you actually want. But more importantly than that, the signature contains a price tag and a link to an account on a electronic currency service such as paypal. "

This is actually almost identical to the Tipster protocol, proposed last summer in the wake of the first Napster injunction. That project ultimately ran up against the unanswerable question of malicious individuals stripping off the artist's signature, and replacing it with their own. The fact that general file-sharing systems are inherently untrustworthy means that we need to take a somewhat different approach to determining who should be paid for downloaded music, aka the "which Lars?" problem.

Right now the smart money is on a system which can calculate the acoustic fingerprint of a given track, and do a lookup against a database to determine track information. The Musicbrainz metadata service promises to figure prominently in this development. More on this later....

Fairshare the second showed up on March 29th: FairShare - Rewarding artists without Copyright by Ian Clarke, progenitor of Freenet.

Consider a simplistic view of how a record label operates. They find early-stage bands who are yet to have a wide audience, but who they consider to have the potential to be very successful. They invest money in that band, and if that band does indeed become a success they make a return on their investment. FairShare essentially democratizes this process. Anybody can "invest" in an artist, and if that artist goes on to be a success, then the person is rewarded in proportion to their investment and how early they made it.

Interesting, especially given that this system is proposed as a means to 'sweeten the deal' for voluntary payments. Now the real irony here is that several weeks ago I was told of just such a scheme on the Espra team's IRC channel, and promptly sworn to secrecy - Ooops, guess they should have announced it a little sooner... (Espra is developing a user-friendly client for Freenet - "Napster with anonymity")

But really this is not a problem. We think it's a good idea, it will help to kick start voluntary payment networks = potlatch networks. What's in a name, other than a convenient handle, 'FairShare' is concise and easy to remember. And Ian and co. say they have no plans to implement it, so all aboard! If everybody making efforts in this space can join forces for a common cause, we have a fighting chance to make it work. And yes, the clock is ticking.

Meanwhile, some random news bits forwarded this morning, evidence of much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth from one end of the music industry to another:

Fighting Pay-for-Play (Salon):

"There are lots of brilliant people who've gotten out of the business because they're sick of it," says one broadcaster who's both owned stations and more recently managed a cluster of influential music stations in a top-10 market.

They're tired of people making an obscene amount of money -- and that is the right word, obscene -- and the obscene amount of abuse that's going on. It's just wrong. We need regulators to look at it, someone who stands up and says this stinks."

Tower Records Executive, Mike Farrace Issues Testimony Regarding Senate Committee On the Judiciary Online Entertainment Copyright Law April 3, 2001 (Press Release):

"The bottom line is that we're pretty frustrated by the progress that's been made so far. We're sympathetic to the record company worries about piracy in cyberspace. We understand their fear of losing control of assets. We think part is fear that it will endanger their profitable and durable physical goods distribution system. And believe me, we understand that too.

But many of the barriers that prevent access to an exhaustive inventory of sound are perplexing, and frankly, lead us to question the motives of our suppliers. We're starting to worry that maybe all the talk and activity about protecting the music is not just about controlling copyright infringement, but is really about controlling lawful use and hiding plans for cutting retailers out of the marketplace. A lot of the deals the record companies seem most interested in pursuing are with each other, or with companies that they all buy a piece of - like MusicNet. They tell us they want us in this business, but they don't follow up with products that we would want to sell or that our customers would want to buy. Instead, Bertelsman buys CDNow which has a strategic relationship with Time Warner which wants to cross license movies with Sony which has a subscription service project with Universal (called Duet) which has a joint venture called ``GetMusic'' with BMG. That's four out of five of my major music suppliers, and the fifth one, no offense to Ken Berry at EMI, has been for sale all year. "

Looks like the knives are out, as the old guard see the writing on the wall...

 Friday, March 23, 2001

darwin diary

getting off the plane was like walking into a sauna - my glasses fogged up - warm rain pounding on the tarmac, palm trees thrashing madly in the darkness.

6th floor - holiday inn darwin. i had to jimmy the sliding glass door to the balcony - guests aren't supposed to open them during the rainy season - apparently everything gets moldy, "even the cat." fuck that - i hate air conditioning. silent flashes of fork lightning illuminate black ranks of thunderclouds marching westward across the timor sea, to the north.

darwin is not a big town, maybe 70 or 80 thousand - but it's the biggest population center for 2500 miles - about equidistant from Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and Jakarta, which is in fact the nearest of these. A first world city projected onto a third-world backdrop.

I'm here because it's the staging area for the UN transitional administration in east timor - I'm meeting with an international group involved in "capacity-building," helping to bring the timorese up to speed in the theory and practice of democratic elections, something they haven't had any experience with.

After 400 years of portugese rule, they were granted independance in 1975, only to be immediately invaded by the Indonesian Army, with attendant pillage and massacre - an event noted by Noam Chomsky and hardly anyone else since then. The legacy of the portugese is their religion: the east timorese are catholics, which distinguish them from the muslims of west timor, and the rest of indonesia.

In 1999 the UN finally succeeded in establishing the illegality of the indonesian occupation, and ran a referendum to let the east timorese decide whether to become a province of indonesia, or an independant state. In the weeks leading up to the referendum, truckloads of indonesian soldiers drove around waving machine guns and warning the locals that if they voted to secede, there would be another massacre. The population turned out in droves anyway, and voted overwhelmingly in favor of independance.

The reprisals were not long in coming. The indonesians burned every hospital, every school, every power plant, police station, and government office in the country. And unknown numbers of people were killed. The UN compound was surrounded by razor wire, then ordered to evacuate when it became clear that there was unsufficient force to protect them. Some of them refused to leave, reasoning that if they did the thousand or so refugees inside the compound would be slaughtered. I stayed up late one night drinking mini-bar whiskey with a couple of these people, who were never really sure that they wouldn't all be slaughtered anyway, they just couldn't bring themselves to leave, while mothers were passing their babies through the razor wire to try to save their lives.

It's an epic story, that i'm not qualified to relate - somebody sure as hell should. And it's far from over - there's an election this summer to elect a consituent assembly which will be charged with drafting a constitution - they don't even have a constituition yet!

as far as elections go, it seems rather futile, given the rough treatment democracy is receiving in the good old US of A lately. There's a conference in Quebec City in a few weeks that may determine the effective sovereignty of Canada, Mexico, South and Central America - and we aren't even allowed to know what's on the agenda! I have to keep telling myself that it's better than nothing, every little bit helps, etc. But if democracy isn't about what you do, how you participate as a citizen, on all the days you don't vote - then it doesn't really mean anything.

---

Via Hack the Planet: Jean Luis Gassée takes the piss out of potlatch.net's nomination for 'vaporware of the year' - the Secure Digital Music Initiative (aka SDMI, pronounced 'sodomy') - "Apparently, it fizzled, because there is no evidence of it today." Unfortunately, the point he's making is that the 'solution' lies in secure hardware, which we are to presume he is intent on supplying. <sigh> It seems everyone wants to eliminate the general-purpose PC except the users.

And this one is a re-run, but I suspect most people missed it the last time we ran this here: I Can't Stop Thinking! (part 5: Coins of the Realm) comics theorist Scott McCloud's plea for just the sort of micropayment system we're proposing here. If you don't mind shelling out $20 or $30 for a 240-page comic book, we highly recommend last year's sequel to his now-classic "Understanding Comics", entitled "Re-inventing Comics" - a book-length manifesto which argues that the creative uses of the web are only just now beginning to unfold, and that without a reasonable system of micro-payments the full potential of this medium will never be realized.

  Monday, March 19, 2001

free music

Napster won the hearts of millions not because it was great software, but because of all the great music it made available. Music has always been a living current, flowing like water through human societies. It is only relatively recently that a few vain individuals thought that they could dam this flow. But people love music, and love to share it - and the internet makes it easy. An era of super-abundance of cultural products of all kinds is here, and it's not going to go away.

What's missing: For true music fans, the worst flaw of napster, (and so far every other file sharing application,) is the fact that if we download a song we like, we can't pay for it, even if we want to. After all, nothing's really for free - and music isn't created in a vacuum. Musicians need an income, no matter how their work is distributed. Audiences need a way to connect with their favorite artists, and to reward and encourage them by paying them directly.

Turning the music business inside out: We need to use the efficiencies of the digital world to connect artists and audiences, and to cut out all the totally useless middlemen clogging up the space between them, and currently taking almost all of the money. Let's stop worrying about fans copying and distributing music, and simply build a system that puts power in the hands of the artists, and makes fans equal partners in the creation and formation of culture. Of course, music is just the beginning...

Potlatch: isn't a company or a brand - it's not a job, it's a life. It's the endless festival, the all-night party of the archangels - the celebration of more than enough to go around. It's the nucleus of a society of abundance, in which status is achieved through generosity and reputation rather than parsimony and greed.

Stay tuned: We're in the process of defining a simple micro-payment system that is owned and controlled by no-one. The first draft of this potlatch protocol describes a few key aspects of what we're trying to do. We're working with artists, programmers, and music lovers from around the world to provide a reference implementation of this system, which anyone will be free to clone or copy without permissions or licencing fees. If you find that you fit any of the above descriptions, and are interested in becoming involved, send a note to jim(at)potlatch.net or check back here over the next few weeks. We should have a mailing list up and running in a few days, and hopefully some toys to play with...

---

Napster lies bleeding...

...mortally wounded from a thousand pinpricks. But the real game isn't about downloads, or even money, other than indirectly - it's about the survival of a venerable scam - the hit-making machinery, which controls what the kids listen to, or more precisely, who has access to the kids. See Pay for Play (Salon) "Why does radio suck? Because most stations play only the songs the record companies pay them to."

On the Pho list, Courtney Love, in the process of suing her label, makes a case for a "united front" of artists to win power back from the industry junta:

Record companies keep almost all the profits. Recording artists get paid a tiny fraction of the money earned by their music. That allows record executives to be incredibly sloppy in running their companies and still create enormous amounts of cash for the corporations that own them.

The royalty rates granted in every recording contract are very low to start with and then companies charge back every conceivable cost to an artist's royalty account. Artists pay for recording costs, video production costs, tour support, radio promotion, sales and marketing costs, packaging costs and any other cost the record company can subtract from their royalties.

Record companies also reduce royalties by "forgetting" to report sales figure, miscalculating royalties and by preventing artists from auditing record company books.

The only really effective way to overthrow this situation will be to put artists in control of the money. This means that the flow of money has to be from the audience, to the artist, as nearly as possible directly. From there, the artists can pay managers, labels, and whomever else they wish, for services rendered, not the other way around like it is now. The Potlatch Protocol is an attempt to develop a payment system that serves this purpose. Whether or not this proposal is accepted or adopted, we need something like it - some way to shell out a nickel or a dime without having it 'trickle down' through an intractable, and unaccountable, corporate pyramid.

 Friday, March 2, 2001

Potlatch Protocol

a decentralized architecture for gift economies

draft proposal 0.1 - March 2001

0. Preamble

In contemporary society, we are accustomed to islands of abundance within deserts of scarcity, islands which must be defended against a constant pressure. Western ideas about economics are founded on this assumption, that there is not enough to go around. Something is considered to be valuable in the degree to which it is scarce, therefore an unlimited resource has very limited value. But this directly contradicts the basic nature of digital products - any sequence of bits can be copied any number of times. And so we are witnessing an enormous effort to prevent computers and networks from doing what they're particularly good at: copying and distributing information. This contradiction can only be resolved by abandoning the idea that scarcity is the only measure of value.

A potlatch is a gift festival, a practice of native societies of the northwest coast of North America, and the foundation of the social and economic systems of these tribes. This institution evolved under conditions in which the basic necessities of life were available in great abundance (eg. salmon, cedar bark, etc.) The public display of generosity, rather than private accumulation, was the measure of social standing. These displays were often competitive in nature, challenges dependant upon the reciprocal nature of the potlatch: to maintain status, each gift must eventually be repaid.

By showing us a working economy based on abundance, gift, and reputation, the potlatch provides us with a valuable reference point as we try to imagine a society in which we don't need to artificially restrict the infinite supply of digital goods in order to ensure that the creators and providers of those goods are properly rewarded.

1. Introduction

The meteoric rise and much-anticipated fall of Napster marks a definite watershed in the history of popular culture, the inflection point at which power visibly shifted toward the end-users, the fans, people anachronistically referred to as "consumers" when in fact literally "no thing" is being consumed. The fact is, file sharing is here to stay. The momentum of technical progress and the will of the people are perfectly aligned in this matter. And yet this irresistable force is on a collision course with the "immovable object" of entrenched economic and political interests, interests which have publicly committed themselves to putting a stop to such nonsense by any means necessary. But short of criminalizing TCP/IP and declaring martial law, it is difficult to imagine an effective way to do this.

It's not too late to try to find a middle path, and we believe that a system which accepts that digital products can and will be copied ad infinitum, and that this process will always escape the control of the creators and "owners" of these products, must also accept that anyone who pays for these products is doing so out of choice, not necessity. This simple reversal of perspective opens the door to a new way of considering economic activity in the digital age. It suggests that there are many unexplored approaches to doing business in an environment of ubiquitious resources, which build upon rather than fight against the new end-user empowerment that is at the root of our current impasse. Somehow the principle that "the customer is always right" has been forgotten amid the rhetoric of both sides.

2. The Potlatch Protocol

Fundamentally, money is nothing other than a promise to pay. An IOU is equivalent to a unit of currency backed by the reputation of the issuer. We propose a micropayment system in which individuals create and transmit small payment certificates consisting of digitally signed XML promissory notes containing at least the following information: the identity (or persistent pseudonym) of the issuer; the identity (or persistent pseudonym) of the recipient; a time stamp; and an amount, which may be arbitrarily small. Popular artists and creators will accumulate these notes until they reach a convenient negotiable sum, and then sell them in aggregate to a third party, who will take on the responsibility of aggregating payments from specific issuers and presenting them for settlement. One's reputation in this system is established as a function of one's reliability.

Here is a scenario: Sheena has been downloading and listening to music created by Dee-Dee, and wants to show her appreciation by giving Dee-Dee a penny every time she listens to a track. Sheena doesn't want to have to make a conscious decision every single time, much less fill in any credit card or personal information, she just wants to set it and forget it. Fortunately she is using a new music player that is capable of doing this: transparently in the background it generates a steady stream of tiny XML files, digitally signed by Sheena, which it transmits directly to Dee-Dee or Dee-Dee's business agent. If some of Dee-Dee's other fans are doing likewise, then every few days we might expect that Dee-Dee will have enough of these heterogenous payment certificates to be worth cashing in. Dee-Dee will be able to choose from among a number of different agencies offering offering variations on this basic service - eg. one may require a service fee, another may pay "face value" simply to get the data, some may guarantee payer anonymity, etc. The point is to create an open market for aggregation. Regardless of which service Dee-Dee chooses, whoever buys these certificates will collect Sheena's payments together (presumably she has been sending these payments to other artists as well) until they have accumulated an amount worth presenting to Sheena for settlement. At this point Sheena can be sure that Dee-Dee and the others have been paid already, and she can check against a list of the certificates she sent to make sure that neither the artist nor aggregator has duplicated any. If Sheena settles with the aggregator, she gains reputation, both among the general community, as someone who is dependable, and specifically with the artists to whom she is contributing, literally getting "in their good books." And if she is unwilling or unable to settle, then Dee-Dee is eventually presented with some bad notes with Sheena's stamp on them, so she will have done nothing but waste a small amount of everyone's time, and lost reputation.

3. Assumptions and Objections

This proposal assumes that there is, or will be, a demand for services of this type. An environment of ubiquitous, viral distribution of digital works suggests the need to establish an economic system which complements rather than opposes this environment. We have no way of knowing beforehand how popular such a system will be - clearly, a lot will depend on issues of convenience and ease of use, and the effectiveness with which artists are able to get the message out: "keep giving us money, and we'll keep making art."

Stephen King recently published an income/expense report on his serialized on-line novel "The Plant", which brought in over $700,000, for a net profit of almost half a million. And yet anyone was free to download without paying - clear evidence that there are lots of folks out there who just want to do the right thing. Despite the generally negative press reaction, it's clear that Amazon.com (which handled King's payment system) took note, and almost certainly patterned their own "honor system" after King's experiment - hardly an indication of failure. King may have been influenced in turn by J. Kelsey and B. Schneier's Street Performer Protocol which outlines a scenario in which digital works are held unreleased, and payments held in escrow, until a pre-determined level of "donations" have accumulated in the escrow account. King's deal with his readers was less formal; he stated that if enough people paid for a given chapter, then the next one would be released. This is an important distinction, it gives power to the end users while at the same time providing them a rational self-interest in supporting the artist. The potlatch protocol makes this process implicit, and makes the production of creative works a collaborative task involving artists and their supporters.

The most obvious objection to this scheme is that it is un-necessary, that we already have adequate systems in place to achieve these goals - why not just use Amazon, or Paypal? This is really a question of design goals, the potlatch protocol representing a conscious attempt to create a decentralized payment system that mirrors the functioning of the internet itself: peer-to-peer, many-to-many, open to all. There is certainly nothing to stop Amazon or Paypal from setting themselves up as aggregators, but a competitive environment will be necessary to keep monopolistic or oligarchic tendencies in check.

Many other objections can be addressed by considering that these payments are entirely at the discretion of the end-user, so that payer and payee have an equal stake in the success of the transaction; and that an open market in which reputation becomes a form of currency will tend to reduce the effectiveness of malicious users. A whole class of "cheating" simply need not be considered - no-one is "buying" anything here, so there's nothing to steal, nothing but one's own good name. It is intended that an open and competitive market for aggregation services will provide a means of both absorbing risk and evolving a business culture that is able to deal with abuses; and also encourage the development of "value-added services", for example anonymous or escrow aggregation services.

More serious is the question of how to be sure that the correct individuals are being paid, or the "which Lars?" problem. In the case of recorded music, we simply pre-suppose that such information is accessible, in one or another meta-database or registry of recorded music. The notion of encapsulating metadata with the track itself is somewhat beside the point, given that the vast majority of audio files in circulation lack any reliable metadata whatsoever.

The security of this system depends on well-documented ideas about digital signatures and public-key cryptography, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this document. Safeguarding one's private key is the weak link in the chain, but under most circumstances, an attacker would be able to do little more than besmirch one's good name.

The legal status of these payments is uncertain. It is likely that the neutrality of a simple gift will insulate all parties from any "vicarious and contributory" activity - surely it can never be illegal to simply give someone money. The point in any case is to put artists in control of the purse strings - if they're under contract to pass this money to their label/management, that is entirely their business. The same goes for taxation. This framework does not insist on anonymity, quite the contrary in fact: it attempts to establish an economy of reputation, which for most people will be associated with their real identity, for most purposes.

4. Conclusions

The potlatch is founded on the principle of reciprocity - what goes around comes around. A gift enhances the reputation of both the giver and the receiver, a win-win or synergistic relationship. Fans should be encouraged to show their appreciation in a meaningful way, to directly support the creation of the music they enjoy. Artists likewise should be encouraged to reward their supporters, for instance advance purchase of concert tickets, special 'member's only' merchandise, or other non-monetary perks. There is no end-point to this process, it is a cycle in which mutual esteem is established and maintained over time.

This protocol is intended to provide a simple and open framework that may form the basis of a new type of industry and a new type of economy. Aggregation services can differentiate in any number of directions, from collaborative filtering and cross-marketing, to barter systems in which real-world goods are indirectly exchanged, and so on. Despite the emphasis on music in much of the above discussion, the principles apply equally to any digital works.

A system of voluntary payments or gifts is both an appropriate and necessary economic structure in an environment of ubiquitous digital distribution. By abandoning the effort to police this flow of bits, a great deal of energy and effort otherwise wasted would be available for simply encouraging people to be honest. But there is a certain urgency to the situation, as many governments and corporations are clearly preparing an all-out assualt on this distribution and this environment, and it seems likely that we will see more wasted effort before we see less.

The physics of information is different from that of material objects, and sooner or later our ethics must reflect this difference. "If you steal my horse I can't ride, but if you steal my song I can still sing it." A struggle is taking place at the very center of our society, but the fundamental shift has already happened - the rules really have changed. Just because something worked in the last millenium doesn't mean it will work in this one. We need to find a peaceful transition from an old paradigm to a new one, and fast: there are orcs abroad.

J. Carrico
Feb-Mar 2001 Vancouver BC

 Wednesday, February 21, 2001

p2pCon wrapup

ok we're back.

Here's some notes on the o'reilly peer-to-peer conference.

There was a tangible polarity to the crowd - not in dress or demeanor but in allegiance. Present in roughly equal quantities were the intelites and microsoftians and their ilk, the old guard desperately trying to find a way to bring this apostate sect back into the orthodox fold; and on the other hand, the revolutionaries themselves, basically ignoring them entirely, serenely propogating their heresy. Most of the interesting projects tended to be well-populated with developers born after the Apple II, but it really wasn't an age thing - a lot of the most interesting ideas were expounded by folks who were already grown up by then. Like Marc Stiegler's Final Exam on "coercian-free societies", Ward Cunningham's user-editable Wiki Wiki Web experiments, and Lawrence Lessig's Free Code, Freeing Culture keynote-manifesto - followed shortly by what may have been the high point of the show, John Perry Barlow's incendiary pronouncement that "... the only way to deal with law in cyberspace is to ignore it, wildly, flagrantly...."

The real action was happening in the hallways, or in the case of the teenage hackers of the Espra team, the terminal room. Like attracted like and common concerns were laid bare pretty freely - despite their obvious rivalry, i thought the chemistry was pretty good between the freenet guys and the mojo nation crew (under the corporate banner "Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow") and there was even talk of gateway protocols for bridging all of the p2p systems together.

It was fun to put names to faces, or in some cases, heads (hi Rob!) and it was especially rewarding to be able to accost some very smart folks with our ideas of a possible architecture for a gift economy, aka the potlatch protocol.

We'll be publishing draft 0.1 of this protocol within a couple of days - check back soon.

 Wednesday, February 14, 2001

invasion of the espians

Dateline San Francisco: Valentines Day 2001

The first ever peer-to-peer conference kicked off today, a love-in for promoters and protagonists of P2P, the next paradigm of computing, based on the subversive notion that we're all equal partners who don't need the permission or mediation of central agents or authorities to communicate, collaborate or otherwise connect with one another.

Amid the hype and hooplah, a small band of teenage visionaries, high on caffeine and sleep deprivation are feverishly preparing to open up the latest front in this revolutionary conflict, a music-sharing application called Espra that bills itself as "anonymous and unstoppable." They could hardly have picked a more auspicious moment, just two days after the 9th Circuit Court of San Francisco dealt what may be a mortal blow to the most celebrated and widely-adopted of P2P applications, Napster. Espra belongs to a new class of network application, inconceivable just a few months ago, built upon Freenet, a radically decentralised and anonymous publishing/distribution system that is itself still under active development.

Espra is intended to make it easy and fun to get music (and, later, any media type) in and out of Freenet. (Freenet itself is concerned with providing an underlying protocol, a 'transport layer' to provide the basic plumbing for a next-generation internet which is immune to the kinds of censorship and denial-of-service attacks to which the current world-wide web is susceptible.) Best of all, and the reason potlatch.net is so enthusiastic, is the fact that the developers of espra have made it a top priority to "...enabl[e] and encourag[e] users to support their favorite artists and creators directly," through a "gift economy" system built into the espra client. At the moment this consists of a "tip artist" button on the espra client that links to fairtunes.com, but once the initial release is sufficently stable and functional, a wider spectrum of payment options will be included.

An active debate is currently raging on the Espra-Dev mailing list over the hows and whys of this payment system. The key word here is "voluntary", a point that has been missed by at least one party to the discussion: the essence of a gift economy is that no attempt is being made to coerce anyone into participating. The principle is rather to make it as easy as possible for people who want to support their favorite artists to do so. The task of establishing this gift economy as a viable alternative to the "enforcement" economy is twofold, requiring an equal effort in developing an easy-to-use and reliable payment architecture, and in conducting a massive propaganda and public-education campaign to convince the downloading masses that it's up to them to support the music they love, by supporting the musicians who create it. This notion may have sounded far-fetched a short while ago, but it's clear from fragments of conversations we've been having with diverse individuals here at p2pCon that both a consciousness of the need and a desire for its fulfillment is approaching critical mass.

It's history in the making, in the hallways and lobbies of the St. Francis Hotel. Don't touch that dial...

 Sunday, February 11, 2001

invasion of the espians

Wow - it's been a pretty crazy week here in potlatch-land. The news of Amazon's "honor system" for voluntary payments has provided an enormous validation of the gift economy, as well as an enormous incentive to provide an open and decentralized alternative. For a quick tour of some of the reactions of the punditry, see the most recent postings to the Fairtunes site.

But the week ahead promises to be even more interesting. To start, on monday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will announce its decision re: the Napster injunction. If the court finds against Napster, the service could be summarily shut down, Bertelsmann deal or no. Either way, speculation is rampant about what will become of Napsters millions of users, when the feces hits the inevitable fan. There's the napster-clones, like OpenNap and Napigator; the gnutella-clones, led by BearShare and LimeWire; and the decentralized/anonymous/encrypted publishing systems best exemplified by Mojo Nation and Freenet.

By a wonderful synchronicity, on wednesday the first-ever O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference kicks off in San Francisco, and most of the luminaries behind the above services, and more besides, will be gathering to try to debate and define the most significant phenomenon in computing since the invention of the web itself. Usually abbreviated P2P, this is an elusive concept that is still rapidly evolving, but may be considered as an outcome of the fact that the average home computer user now has more processing power, storage and bandwidth than was available to the US Government scarcely a generation ago. This is inexorably shifting the center of gravity of the internet away from centralized servers, and toward the edges of the network, the millions of ordinary people with ordinary PCs - an emergent property of a complex system that has appeared, as emergent properties do, unexpectedly.

Potlatch.net will be on the scene, and we'll try to post an update or two as events proceed. We'll also be making contact with what may be the most unconventional entry into this decidedly unconventional milieu - the madmen behind the Espra project. This has been described as "napster with anonymity", a music-sharing service that piggy-backs on Freenet, which began life last fall as the Tropus project. For those who haven't been following this story, most of the original development team for Tropus were hired by an occluded entity from London, England called ESP, which gave the project a new name and trajectory. For the last several months, Espra has been pretty much under wraps, leading to accusations of vaporware from the spectator's gallery. But Espra is alive and well, and as this screenshot attests, it's looking pretty good. In our own experiments, the latest build of Freenet (0.3.7) is working pretty well, and it seems that streaming audio from freenet is now a reality! (We ran our first .m3u (mp3 playlist) file from freenet a few days ago, a major milestone indeed.)

What makes the immanent beta release of Espra especially exciting is the developers dedication to the concept of a gift economy - and the fact that they're building a "tipping" capability in on the ground floor. The Espra-Dev mailing list has been abuzz - finally! - with a lively debate over the finer points of just how this new economic system should function. It may take a few iterations before we arrive at a standardized protocol for voluntary payments (aka the potlatch protocol) that is agreeable to all parties; nonetheless, it's clear that a critical mass of opinion is converging on the conviction that we need such a protocol, and we need it now.

 Tuesday, February 6, 2001

the potlatch principle

(the following was posted to /. in response to the news of Amazon.com's announcement of a voluntary payment aka "tip jar" system.)

OK folks, the ice is definitely melting on this concept. In a world in which you can't prevent people from copying your work, once it's been converted to a digital format, then the only way you're going to get them to pay is on a voluntary basis. We don't think much of the term "tipping" - it might be taken to imply an unequal relationship - we just call it "paying." The fact that it doesn't happen under threat of incarceration is irrelevant - it's still just a payment. Which requires a payment mechanism - some type of negotiable currency that can be transmitted in arbitrarily large or small amounts.

Amazon jumping into this space is clearly a direct attack on paypal's dominance in "what-passes-for-micropayments-nowadays", which is in turn a validation of what paypal is doing. The two biggest problems with the first generation of micropayment systems was

1. ease of use (not)
2. proprietary and patented "standards"

Among on-line payment systems, paypal has done the best job so far of making it easy to send and recieve money - which isn't saying much. As for standards - who knows what patent horrors await us? Presumably one or another of these titans will begin some massive strategic litigation and try to clear, or at least clog up, the field. But while dinosaurs fight, there's some mammals somewhere eating their eggs.

The open source community and the independant music scene needs to join forces. Here's a quote from a recent post to the Pho list:

"I don't know any hacker who doesn't think that musicians should get paid for their music. Some of my hacker friends compose music. I don't know any musicians that aren't excited by the subversive nature of the Internet and peered distribution mechanisms and, consequently, who don't respect hackers. Why don't we both work together, put down our swords, figure out how to put bread in each other's mouths (yes, even hackers are having a harder time than usual with that these days) and subvert the structure that has caused this unnatural schizm between us?"

So what is the nature of this schism? It seems to be related to the fact that the captains of the entertainment industry have emphatically and to a man (I'm betting they're all men) declared an undying jihad against "wholesale copyright infringement", and are willing to, in John Gilmore's words, "... destroy the future of free expression and technological development, so they could sit in easy chairs at the top of the smoking ruins and light their cigars off 'em." Why is it that the media industry has such power that they can appear to dictate the very laws of nature if it is necessary to protect their interests? Do they really stand to lose so much money from file-sharing? (There's not much evidence of this yet...) And why is it that the tail of entertainment is wagging the dog of commerce?

Because it's not about money, it's about control. Culture is the most important commodity because it's the one that sells all the others, not only overtly through advertising, but implicitly, by establishing "social norms", subtle biases, and hidden assumptions. As the content and ads, news and entertainment blend and become one, the public is immersed in a bland and shallow "reality" in which they pretty much go along with anything.

The internet gives independant culture a chance, however slim, to reach a large audience without having to go through the mediation of "the industry" - and this is the greatest terror of partisans of the neo-feudal "new world order". For similar reasons, 'anonymous cash' micropayment systems have been "fumbled" by those who should have been developing and promoting standards - ie. governments and banks - because they see it - quite rightly - as potentially sewing the seeds of their own demise.

An open-source micropayment system could provide a way for fans to pay artists directly, with no middle man. Such a system would have to be established on a "web of trust" model, to avoid any possibility of control by dubious central "authorities". It would require the cooperation of many people, all over the world, to overcome the obvious chicken-and-egg problem, but the history of the net suggests that this may not be as unlikely as it appears. We propose to call this system a potlatch network, after the gift festivals of the northwest coast. Napster et al. is providing one half of a gift economy - we need to complete the circuit by providing a way for fans to support their favorite artists. The implicit contract is an informal version of Kelsey and Shneier's Street Performer Protocol, in which payments are effectively for future works - the carrot rather than the stick: "give us money and we'll release more art." Steven King's experiment was reported as a failure by the New York Times - but he made $600,000 dollars with virtually no expences. (read King's reply to the NYT.)

This not only can work, it is working. What Amazon's doing is an attempt to insinuate themselves into a central position as experiments in voluntary payments (micro- or otherwise) begin to mature. And we all know how much we can trust Amazon, right? We're interested in any insight or assistance in specing out this proposed network, comments welcome.

 Monday, January 22, 2001

and so it's war...

These people are lunatics, who would destroy the future of free expression and technological development, so they could sit in easy chairs at the top of the smoking ruins and light their cigars off 'em. - John Gilmore

A call to arms on slashdot this morning: What's Wrong With Copy Protection, an eloquent rant by EFF founder John Gilmore on the massed offensive now in progress on the part of the forces of the "copy-tight " or "artificial scarcity" industries to hold back history and human evolution.

His initial point is about a couple of 'stealth' initiatives recently announced/unearthed to provide the infrastructure for an 'end-to-end' un-crackable, un-copyable distribution channel for digital content. This will require building traps and backdoors into all forms of computer and consumer electronics hardware that will essentially take control of these devices away from the user (and purchaser!) and hand it over to the private interests of the international media cartels. (for some background, see The Register's excellent coverage of the Copy Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) fiasco.)

This is an excellent exposé all by itself, but once he gets rolling he draws some very general conclusions about choices and decisions being made by corporate logic which are not only anti-human, but anti-technology as well, and just plain evil.

What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. We now have the means to duplicate any kind of information that can be compactly represented in digital media. We can replicate it worldwide, to billions of people, for very low costs, affordable by individuals. We are working hard on technologies that will permit other sorts of resources to be duplicated this easily, including arbitrary physical objects ("nanotechnology"; see http://www.foresight.org). The progress of science, technology, and free markets have produced an end to many kinds of scarcity. A hundred years ago, more than 99% of Americans were still using outhouses, and one out of every ten children died in infancy. Now even the poorest Americans have cars, television, telephones, heat, clean water, sanitary sewers -- things that the richest millionaires of 1900 could not buy. These technologies promise an end to physical want in the near future.

We should be rejoicing in mutually creating a heaven on earth! Instead, those crabbed souls who make their living from perpetuating scarcity are sneaking around, convincing co-conspirators to chain our cheap duplication technology so that it WON'T make copies -- at least not of the kind of goods THEY want to sell us. This is the worst sort of economic protectionism -- beggaring your own society for the benefit of an inefficient local industry.

They really are serious. Now that GWB - or rather, his puppeteers - have their hands on the levers of power, you better believe this shit is coming at us. There's no time to lose, kiddies...

So what does it mean to have a society of abundance? In the part of the world where I accidentally happened to be born (the northwest coast of north america) native societies lived within a social framework in which everything necessary for survival was available in practically unlimited amounts. "Commodities" as we may understand them were essentially free - one only had to go get it, whatever it was - salmon, shellfish, cedar bark, etc.

This pre-columbian leisure society evolved an appropriate social form, which provided a framework for the equitable distribution of wealth, as well as an outlet for competition and sparring for social dominance. The core institution was the Potlatch, a gift festival in which one clan would fete and feast another, which was both an invitiation to enter into a close bond, and a challenge to try to surpass the generosity of the potlatch hosts, at a later time. These went on all winter long, and constituted "the solemn assembly of the tribe" (see Mauss, The Gift, 1950), during which what we would term public policies were debated and enacted.

This institution was particularly well developed in the native american societies from California to Alaska, but it is present in one form or another in every world society, and it is always the reciprocal nature of the gift which is central. This is present in the familiar idea that accepting a gift implies an obligation to return it - not in the literal sense of giving it back (that would be refusing to accept it - a grievous insult) or whipping out your wallet and paying for it (which would be an even greater affront.) And even in the cutthroat and "pragmatic" world of business it is ultimately a very careful balance of favors granted and owed that carries the day - "Godfather, do this small thing for me..." etc.

Potlatch.net exists to promote, propagandize, and experiment with the theory and practice of the gift economy of the future, which is as Gillmore very forcefully suggests, the only way off of the runaway train of corporatism.

The gift economy has hitherto relied on face-to-face contacts, personal relationships. It will be necessary to devise a way to build upon this principle in the "billion channel universe" of the internet. My guess is that we need to develop a network of networks composed of groups of people who actually know one another, who can vouch for each other in meaningful ways. Groups of several hundred people would have an "aggregate reputation" that could be trusted to persist in time, even if a reasonable proportion of members turned out to be flakes.

We don't just need a boston tea party - we need a form of economic power that will allow us to operate from a position of strength and independance. The only practical way to do this will be to devise ways of withdrawing value and services from the current centralized financial system, and placing it in trust of future generations by extending the principles of copyleft and the free software movement into every area of society.

The only way to arrest the 'de-evolution' of our society -- in which what you are is reduced to what you have, and what you have is reduced to what you just think you have -- is to launch a counter-offensive of abundance, a potlatch to which the whole world is invited. A good first step is to take a look at the OpenContent licence for digital works, and start using it, extending it, and educating and encouraging others to use and extend it. A good next step would be to start building local groups in which resources and contributions are freely shared, a pot-luck approach to social organization - and to imagine ways for these local groups to "peer" with one another to allow gifts to be offered and accepted across regional boundaries.

to be continued...

 Friday, January 12, 2001

micropayments and tip jars

updated Jan.19

note: the exchange on Fairtunes.com between Matt Goyer and Peter DiCola continues, and of course we've got to get our $0.02 in.

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I just followed a link from voluntary payment site Fairtunes.com to an interview with the Future of Music Coalition member Peter DiCola, in which he re-iterates his opinion (expounded at length in an article from last October criticizing The Online Tip Jar Experiment) that enabling fans to make voluntary payments (aka "tips") is "dangerous and economically non-intuitive."

here's my (original) reply

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This guy is swinging at imaginary bats here - this level of denial is understandable in industry types - those whose roles and livelihoods are threatened by *any* changes in the current order. One can only assume that he aspires to a similar role.

Really: "dangerous"? WTF!! How on earth is it that providing folks who download someone's art, and want to reward the creator, with a means to do so, is undermining *in any way* the ability of these artists to carry on business in any other real, possible, or imaginary way?

It is dangerous only to the "re-intermediation" that so many bright but misguided souls seem to be seeking these days, forgetting that it is just this short-sighted hubris and completely-missing-the-point tunnel vision that has led the ridiculous "e-commerce revolution" into the smoking crater it currently inhabits.

case in point: Steven King releases a book in installments on the web - over six months, and six installments, he takes in $600,000 on a completely voluntary basis. He then announces that he is taking a hiatus to meet some other commitments. Unbelievably, the news media report with oozing smugness that this proves that his experiment is a "failure". One wonders what would constitute a success. Why do they make such a preposterous claim? Hint: that 600 grand is going straight to SK's pocket - "...no printing costs, publisher's cuts, or agents' fees to pull it down". Read his response to the NY Times article - which they declined to print by the way, if you don't believe me: http://www.stephenking.com/sk_120400_2.html

This should be big news, but the big news media don't want to report it. Steven King has single handedly proven that voluntary payments can indeed work - and that creators can go directly to their audience, cutting large numbers of completely useless middlemen out of the loop entirely. This is something that the New York Times, Edgar Bronfman, and, apparently, Peter DiCola don't want to see, and don't want anyone else to see either.

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This represents to me the artificial propogation of a false meme - similar in many respects to the false meme that micropayments have also "failed". What micropayments? Neither of these strategies have caught on with the mainstream, for the simple reason that they've never been given an adequate opportunity to do so. <sarcasm> I mean, let's face it: nickels, dimes and quarters will never be popular - they're bulky and inconvenient, nobody wants to spend them, and any business that relies on transactions of this size is obviously doomed. </sarcasm> Micropayments aren't happening for lots of little reasons, but mainly one big one: the banks don't want it. These guys are no dummies - they are perfectly aware that the infrastructure that would allow micropayments must necessarily lead them down a slippery slope toward irrelevance. "*Gasp* - the public buying and selling without going through us? That's communism... or... something..." So the micropayment "market" was fragmented and FUDed and legislated (by onerous crypto regulation) out of existence, before it had a chance to develop.

Let's look at another "tip jar" success that is being spun as a failure: on January 2nd (year 1 of the potlatch millenium) Pyra Labs, creators of the popular Blogger weblog-hosting site, put out an appeal to their users to try to raise funds for new servers. It seems that the popularity of their (free) service was overwhelming their existing hardware, and their ability to find investment was likewise exhausted in this dot-com-gone era. They hoped to raise $5000 - last time I checked, they were at $11,265. An article about this phenom in Fortune magazine is entitled Freebies Aren't Forever. Attention - Fortune headline writers: Blogger is still free, and nowhere on the site is any mention of any plans to start charging money. Blogger is a gift, and they are asking their users to return the gift. This is eminently reasonable and logical, by any human measure of reason and logic. I suppose that lets economists off the hook, but obviously there are a lot of people who understand this simple concept - if someone gives something of value to you, it behooves one to give something in return. This not only raises self-esteem, but mutual esteem, it creates a bond between the two parties that cannot be achieved by force. This is the real face of the "new economy".

It seems to us that micropayments and online tip jars will tend to reinforce one another's success and "market penetration". We'll save for another day an analysis of just how this might come about, and leave you with this highly pertinent comic/essay by new-media theorist and cartoonist Scott McLoud, part 5 of his online comic "I Can't Stop Thinking" entitled Coins of the Realm.

 Wednesday, January 10, 2001

The Future of Music

the first ever Future of Music Policy Summit is being held today and tomorrow in Washington DC, and I'm missing it! Interestingly, both days are binary: 01-10-01 and 01-11-01. Anyway, we're busy down here in the trenches trying to create the future rather than just talk about it. (Although I'm sorry I won't be there to watch Chuck D. go up against the RIAA's Hilary Rosen.) Wired and Inside.com are covering the story.

We can't say we agree with the premise of one of the conference organizers, Michael Bracy, that

'"..the focus of the music industry is coming to Washington, if it's not there already. There is so much conflict in the industry that will have to be resolved in Washington, either in the Supreme Court or in Congress. ... We are setting the table for that.''

It seems to us that the overwhelming trend in music and technology over the last few years has been a radical decentralization - an empowerment of autonomous relationships at the periphery of what the gov't, media and corporations consider to be important (ie themselves.) And that this conflict, far from being resolved in Washington, is being played out in bedrooms and dormrooms all over the world. It's way too late to hope that a conference of supposed experts is going to resolve anything.

 Tuesday, January 9, 2001

Potlatch 0.001 Alpha

This site is intended to function as a whiteboard or prototyping lab dedicated to exploring the concept of a "potlatch" or gift-exchange network. As artists and creators, we believe that the free and ubiquitous distribution of our works in digital form is not a problem to be overcome, but rather an opportunity to be seized - an opportunity to reach our audiences directly, with no middlemen. This is one-half of a gift economy for culture. In order for this gift economy to function in the long run, we need to encourage our audiences (readers, listeners, fans, friends...) to support us directly in turn. Such reciprocation represents the return stroke of a new economic engine. (Actually the oldest of economic engines.)

We aren't absolutely certain that this strategy will work, but we are sure that it is worth a try. We've been communicating with partisans of the Espra project, an initiative to build a napster-like interface for Freenet, which hopes to incorporate similar voluntary-payment system, and we have other allies and co-conspirators too numerous to introduce in this short space. But for now we intend to develop a self-contained 'bare-bones' module, as a point of reference for discussion and further experimentation. Good design suggests the simplest possible approach.

Minimum requirements of a potlatch network:

1. A means for artists and creators to release digital representations of their work, as a gift to the world and to future generations.
2. A means for members of the public to contribute directly to artists - as a reward for work already released and an incentive for continued production.

To which we may add, the requirement that it be reasonably difficult to abuse, and brainlessly simple to use.

For this pilot phase, we have obtained permission to release four albums by musicians from Vancouver, BC. For now, we will be making these available for download via normal HTTP or FTP servers. However, we intend to encourage users to obtain these files via one or another of the peer-to-peer file sharing systems (napster, freenet...), entirely off-loading distribution onto the network, thereby keeping artists' expenses to an absolute minimum.

We'll be providing a back-end service for these artists, allowing them to place the essential get art and send money buttons on their sites, which will connect to a multi-user database server forming a local exchange or "potlatch node". Users will be expected to eventually make a real contribution in order to continue to use the system - either a contribution "in kind" - cultural products that other members actually want - or if necessary, "just money".

 Thursday, December 21, 2000

the Gift Economy

Talent wanted for getting out of this and playing.

Welcome to Potlatch. We're at a very early stage of deployment of a new revenue model for musicians, artists, and creators. We believe that culture in its essence is always a potlatch - a gift festival, in which those who are "gifted" with talent and vision offer these gifts to the world - and the world, in turn celebrates and supports them. The rise of the internet resembles a potlatch in this sense - both in the free software that provides much of its technical underpinnings, and in the free dissemination of cultural products that drives its growth and popularity.

Day One, Year One

Last night around midnight a ragtag band of 50-60 ravers, skaters, and ageless hipsters performed an improvised "poetic terrorist" action along two blocks of Hastings Street, Vancouver, in a neighborhood known as the Downtown Eastside, but recently just called Cracktown. A celebration of the solstice - the last of the millenium - as a festival of light and rebirth. Cops and crackheads equally dumb-struck as the crowd, enveloped in clouds of incence and ganga passed by bearing spirit houses laden with gifts for the South, West (Victory Square), North, and East (Pigeon Park). A manifestation of the light that always returns.

It was also the symbolic launch of the Potlatch Network - headquartered right in the heart of this urban wilderness. Our goal is to reclaim our own culture, which is the collection of stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and where our dreams and aspirations lead us. First of all we need to develop a means to avoid having to collectively sell our soul cheap and buy it back dear - to do this we need to have a simple way to connect artists with their audiences directly with no middleman.

To this end we are entering a pre-alpha design phase, attempting to define the simplest possible form of a "potlatch node" - an interface through which artists can make a conscious gift of their art, and audiences can, if they are moved to do so, give something back. This will be applied at first to recorded music, although we are already working with cartoonists and visual artists who have expressed interest in the concept. To start, 4 albums recorded by local musicians, and either unreleased, under-exposed or otherwise unavailable.

Here's the list:

• Abintra (2000, self-titled debut album by euro-pop-electronic duo)

• Copyright (1991, an obscure classic by one of Canada's most mysterious and notorious bands)

• Kevin Kane - Neighborhood Watch (1995, solo album by co-founder of the recently reformed Grapes of Wrath.)

• Velvet Collective (1999, live downtempo/house collective from Victoria, BC - the A&R; guys were swarming all over this last year after they slew 'em at SXSW, until the lads realized that the labels weren't offering them anything that they couldn't do for themselves!)

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last update: Wednesday, December 26, 2001 at 10:22:03 AM. This is a Manila site