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Peer pressure

(Engels)

“When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push the infringements ‘down to zero’. If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement.” (Lessig, p.74)

What is the percentage of identified infringing material on the Pirate bay? The discourse whether This portal is illegal or not shouldn’t be that complex. Free Culture, to me, is very important. We have should take the distribution of creativity very seriously! Creativity is the catalyst for inspiration, which in its place, is responsible for the social, political, and commercial development of our cultural identity. P2P – as an infrastructure – is a substantial contribution to the development of our cultural identity. The Pirate Bay (what’s in the name) facilitates this contribution as well! but, this has its influence on the revenue of honest creators. If we accept and normalize an amount of distributed infringing material, then, on the basis of the ratio between illegal and legal distribution, we could determine whether a facilitator operates illegal.

A few questions pop up… What really is illegal, when we accept a system that is old and based upon ‘property’ in a virtual world of endless re-productivity? Does a maximum compressed movie-file, which doesn’t comes near the original quality, is eligible for copyright infringement? Or, why should we prohibit or normalize illegal downloading when we technologically could enforce zero tolerance? Why isn’t the government being held responsible when a car driver is speeding and distrusting cocaine? P2P is held responsible in the same way! In my opinion, if the Pirate bay is excessively violating the norm (not 99.4%) then they should be punished! But what is the norm? Maybe we should be focusing on that!

A decline in p2p-sharing

(Engels)

I just read an article on Tweakers that Ipoque, a German company that sells ‘deep packet inspection-hardware’, has published a study on the distribution of protocol classes. This chart is a representation of their findings.

distribution of protocol classes (source: Tweakers.net)

With the ‘deep packet inspection-hardware’ internet Providers can analyze internet traffic. This hardware also enables providers to regulate the traffic by providing the ability to filtering and prioritize certain protocols. As a result, P2P-traffic is declining. Be that as it may, more interesting to me is the fact that Tweakers mentions the decline of P2P over the ‘normal’ web traffic. I think we could better speak of P2P-traffic as being the norm because of its hegemony. Anyway, the regional coverage of the study has been extended to include eight regions of the world, namely: Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany, the Middle East and Southern Europe, Northern and Southern Africa, South America and Southern Europe. The data that has been analyzed is of one provider/region. The amount of users per region differs between 50.000 and 250.000.
Here are some of the key findings of the study summed up. (published here):

P2P generates most traffic in all regions
The proportion of P2P traffic has decreased BitTorrent is still number one of all protocols, HTTP second.
The proportion of eDonkey is much lower than last year.
File hosting has considerably grown in popularity.
Streaming is taking over P2P users for video content
Usenet, a file sharing alternative for P2P, appears in the statistics for the first time

Would the decline of (war on) P2P-traffic be a result of the ‘creative property’-right lobbyists?
Would this decline worsen the ability to get a hold on ‘creative property’ from of which we get inspired to create our own?
Would this be the end of ‘free culture’?

Concept: using Twitter for book summaries

(Engels)

Every university- or college student has to deal with books to build a foundation on your knowledge within a field of expertise. My learning method is no different than method other students use. This is my method; the first step is using my magic marker to highlight important text. Then I’ll collect the marked area’s and will write them down in a chronological order by using MS Word. finally, I will summarize the most important bits into a readable and coherent text. As far as I know, their is not really a practice of working together in summarizing lectures. Google Docs has the functionality, but I don’t use it often…

I think it would be interesting, as an experiment, to find out if Twitter.com would be a helpful medium to summarize text in a cooperative manner. Thus, collectively building a summary using Twitter.com.

I started of by summarizing Lawrence Lessig’s ‘Free Culture’ (creative commons licence) and putting the important bits into Twitter.com. The result is an bunch of lines (summary-bits), which are structured as followed. A line starts of with the chapter name, e.g. Introduction. It is then followed by quoted text, the author and a page number.

Screenshot of Twitter

A disadvantage I immediately did come across, was the lack of ability to post a comment directly targeted at (under) a twitter post. Howe ever, that’s just not the way Twitter.com (wants to) function(s). If you leave a comment, it will – based on the time of the post – show on top. Twitter’s monologue-logic prefers time over context. Tweakers.net is totally different, but its tree-functionality works!

Tweaker and context-based comments

Another disadvantage of Twitter.com’s functionality was the inability to filter posts. As a result, users have to start reading the summary-bits backwards. Users prefer to read the summary-bits in a chronological order.By using the Twitter-API, I am able to change the summary-bits into a data set, which can be modified. In the picture below, the result of the data set is showing. Because, I’ve used a consistent ‘syntax’ within the text, filtering the data set was easy.

Using Twitters API

To conclude this little experiment. I think it’s very interesting to think about cooperative ways of writing summaries and micro-blogging. Twitter.com is not the best medium as it is. Due to the lack of direct commenting and filtering. But altering its functionality, for example using its API, will create opportunities. So, I do recommend a forum based structure, like the tweakers.net example. However, building a Twitter clone with adjustments would be the best solution for writing summaries in the future.()

Learning from hardware: Rethinking Cooperative

(Engels)

A few weeks ago, I was watching Paul Bennett, who was one of the guest speakers at the annual TED conference. He, as a creative director, was propagating new ways in thinking of problem solving and solution finding. Doing so by trying to think “out of the box”, as he said. That inspired me into writing this post: Rethinking cooperation.

When we collaborate, each of us contributes special powers (trumps) to raise the efficiency or quality of the collective effort as a well oiled chain. This type of cooperation could be problematic if a key member decides to split, because we are depending on each other’s effort. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, so this could jeopardize the collective effort. Why does, in this example and in many other projects, the collective rely on such a fragile structure? When the individuals pass on their knowledge to their colleagues, they will obviously loose their trump and become replaceable. The collective effort will, on the one hand, benefit from this, because it does not rely on the contribution of one individual anymore. But, on the other hand, the individual looses its competitive advantage and becomes replaceable. Could there not be a way for the two interests to converge?

Maybe we could find a solution, when we take a look beyond sociology into the realms of data management and push ourselves into thinking in metaphors. Hard drives can work together in several combinations (RAID-0 / -5). Each of these combinations have different aims (qualities). RAID-0 combines speed with quantity, but jeopardizes the integrity of the data. Hence, to jeopardize the collective effort when a key member splits. RAID-5, for many companies is the most reliable and fastest solution for data management. A few hard drives are ’sacrificed’ to maintain the greater good (Every member of a project has, besides its own knowledge, a little bit of knowledge of the other members). The RAID-5 solution does not work as fast as RAID-0, but is more reliable. (RAID-5 as a metaphor, could be labour intensive, but could spare a project member).

This brings me to the notion of ‘free cooperation’, which I will go into later on…

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Peer pressure

A decline in p2p-sharing

Concept: using Twitter for book summaries

Learning from hardware: Rethinking Cooperative

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