Reuters.com is reporting that Oink, an invite-only, BitTorrent site, has been shut down and its owner arrested.
For the purposes of this blog, let's try to simplify what a BitTorrent is. Basically, you log onto a site and you can see the names of the albums and you would click on one and that would open a page describing that record. Clicking on the next correct link would download a torrent tracker. This torrent tracker, when used in conjunction with a program called a client, will work to download all of the necessary files (songs and sometimes artwork) from another user. See the concept in action at Etree, which specializes in sharing live recordings of artists that approve taping their shows.
On the down low, Oink may have operated privately, but this is probably one of the biggest digital music busts since Napster, just much more highly exclusive. I know I couldn't beg, borrow or steal and invite from anyone. Oh, uh, that, um, doesn't mean I wanted one. Of course not.
But let me just toss this out there. This is continued to be referred to as illegal file sharing. Now, I'm not saying that artists should work for free. My word, I'm not saying that.
However, to piggyback off of Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig, by shutting sites such as this one down, as a society, we're effectively saying that listening to music is illegal. Why is is that we've allowed advances in technology to improve and breath life into other models of art and culture — look at how compact discs revolutionized the movie industry and the way movies are distributed with DVDs — but we have used the Internet, which should be a valuable tool for creating and building up the culture of music and music lovers, to choke, stifle and control our ability to even listen to a CD? (Hear a great discussion on this between Lessig and Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy at the Internet Archive.)
I'm struggling to understand why it is a bad thing if someone on the other side of the globe exposes me to a record I may not have heard otherwise. Perhaps I'll really love that artist and I'll go out and buy subsequent records, making me a fan. That puts the onus back on me to be a responsible consumer. (Sort of like the situation with Radiohead's In Rainbows album.)
I don't have the answers. I just think it's wrong to say, essentially, that listening to music is illegal.
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