Re:TheAshLad - Sandbooks

that were lost. over time records lent and never returned and that thanks
to. digital swapping turn up again. Music is in fact contained not only.
in the safes of industry or the dusty ledgers of copyright. associations
but in everyone's home via the myriad cds vinyl discs. and cassettes
which together represent an enormous heritage of music.. Digitizing
this heritage although sometimes available only in. snatches with
technical limits means it can take shape so that it. can reach and satisfy
anyone. The very notion of ownership of a music. product is radically
redefined by its changing into something which. is not material. Apart
from reassessing the contents one owns insofar. as they are merely
activators of other exchanges peertopeer. networks are perhaps the first
model of contents 'ondemand' which. has truly worked because it is
negotiated between peers. The notion. of a network has worked
splendidly here since it is others who keep. one's own memory of
music.. The reward is not only 'obtaining' music but also taking part in
an. enormous collective process as happens with a chat room
newsgroup. or blog. Sharing one's files is thus no mere act of
generosity or a. gesture that it is hoped will encourage others to do the
same but an. act of participation proving one is part of a game a process
or a. collective performance intended to liberate sounds and share them.
As. John Perry Barlow says 'the more connected we become the more.
obvious it is that we're all in this together'() this is the. culture of the
net which is expanding rapidly rewarding collective. consciousness
expressed via the artistic heritage of musicians and. which lives again
in our memory. Basically as stated by 'Lord of the. Borrowers' a highly
active user making available his Gigabytes of. data 'There are loads of
people out there who have no idea of the. use they could make of their
computers ... I think I'm doing a public. service.'() This is a similar
concept to Michael Robertson's who. had conceived mp.com as a
'service bureau' based on the assumption. that 'data changes the
balance of power'() .. Thus a public service but selforganized and
selfgenerated with. ramifications which whenever pruned by court
action regrow and. thrive more than ever like creatures of myth. Once
started the. sense of community knows no bounds. That was seen in the
spring of. when the RIAA drew up a list of . tracks to be eliminated. the
servers of Napster. Immediately there were groups and single. users
who came up with stratagems that were imaginative to say the. least
such as using the figure '' instead of 'to' or writing the. names of the
tracks backwards or in pig latin or even creating sites. automatically
converting the names into forms which could not be. recognized by the
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