A set of slides about the issues I faced during my research project Digital Culture Industry: A History of Digital Distribution. It focuses on the use of digital documents in documentary analysis and the issues of using these documents.

1. DIGITAL CULTURE INDUSTRY:
A HISTORY OF DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION
www.DigitalCultureIndustry.com
James Allen-Robertson

2. THE RESEARCH
Where did the Digital Distribution of Media come from?
Culture LawPolitics

3. THE AIM
MP3.com
Napster
GNUtella
FastTrack (Kazaa)
BitTorrent
The Pirate Bay
To produce
detailed histories
of the illicit roots
of digital media
distribution.
To understand
how this social
change occurred.
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4. Structural
Biographical
Relationship Between
Big Picture
Focus on Society
Little Picture
Focus on Small Events
THE APPROACH
Actor Network
Theory
Structuration
Theory
STS approach to
innovation

5. THE DOCUMENTS OF
THE INTERNET ARCHIVES
Blogs
Software
Release Notes
Social Media
Comments
Podcasts
Forums
Court Documents
Business
Registrars
Newspaper
Archives
Videos
THE METHOD
Digital Documentary Analysis
DNS Registrars

6. METHODOLOGICAL
ISSUES
Information Overload
Mediated Information
Authenticity
Information Scarcity
Authority
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1924144

7. MEDIATED INFORMATION
Undisclosed Politics
Finding Fact in Fiction
Traditional Historiography
Default to Distrust
Primary > Secondary Internet Historiography
Account for Bias Report on Conflict
Cross-Reference for Fact
Everything is Secondary

8. LACK OF INFORMATION
No custodian
Never Recorded
Not maintained
Can lead to over-reliance on a small group of sources
Reliability with a small sample:
Does this make sense Chronologically?
Biographically?

9. AUTHORITY
Sometimes the ‘real’ reporters
are farthest from the source.
Under-reporting in traditional news
Misunderstanding of technical
and organisational details
Amateurs
Highly integratedTrusted
Comments act as editor
Anonymity of sources
Significant reliance on community
reporting

10. AUTHENTICITY
Historical Method
Don’t use a Copy, use the Original
Which source is the ‘original’?
Digital sources can be edited
Digital sources can disappear
Copies may be more ‘original’ than the original

11. INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Following stories as they break...
Inaccuracy
Misinformation
Conflicting Reports
Internet ‘Echoes’can be useful
and can be trying

12. Internet Archives
=
Too Much Information?Messy

13. Detail☑is important

14. ...but it was necessary to [frame]it
Identifying the topic
What is the story you want to trace?
Collecting the dataStoring
tagging
keywords
Analysing the data
names
dates
connections
associations
Plotting the datatimelines
diagrams
interacting
overlapping
narratives

15. you produce...
A Story
descriptive, empirically grounded
about
Change
Agency
Power
Disruption
Structures

16. THE OUTPUTS
4. MP3/.com & Napster: The
Entrepreneurs of Risk
As I have already mentioned, the popular narrative of how the distribution of media
went digital will inevitably always begin with Napster. It holds the honour of
marking the ‘beginning’ of our turn to digital distribution as the most prominent and
most rapid disruption in media’s recent history. What should become apparent
over the coming chapters is that beginnings are arbitrary; the sheer complexity of
the influences and pre-requisites required for any event means that to identify one
of those pre-requisites as ‘cause’, is immediately contestable. What can be
exploited however is that though the conventions of narrative require a beginning,
they do not necessarily require a cause. The beginning in this narrative is not a
cause, it is an entry point, one chosen for its role as a pre-requisite to Napster and
as a pre-requisite to many of the other elements within the story. Broadly
speaking, Napster was produced because of the prevalence of the MP3. Our
second question then should be why was the MP3 prevalent?; our first question
should be, MP3?
4.1 MP3/.com
The MP3‘s route to widespread user adoption was circuitous, beginning in the
1970s as an unproven concept of sending music as files over telephone lines.
Professor Dieter Seitzer, working at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, was
trying to optimise the transmission of speech over phone lines as part of a wider
movement to expand the capacities and features of the phone network. The idea
of optimising music was a side-interest, but when he was denied a patent based
on the examiner’s verdict that the concept was ‘impossible’ he assigned one of his
PhD students to prove them wrong. This kicked off a large collaborative process of
research across the seventies and eighties to work out how to optimally compress
audio whilst still retaining the music itself. Development was slow as often they
would only be able to store a short sample of audio at a time due to relatively small
storage capacities, and processing time was limited at the universities in which
they were working. In 1991 the researchers successfully compressed an entire
song, ‘Tom’s Diner’ by Suzanne Vega, and took their work to the Fraunhofer
4: MP3/.com & Napster
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5. GNUtella: Decentralising the
Masses
It was 1999 and Justin Frankel was working in his cubicle at AOL when he came
across Napster. As a programmer and music lover Frankel appreciated the
ingenuity of the code but took issue with the profit motive that drove Napster inc.
Frankel approved of file-sharing as a way of empowering people via the free flow
of information, but disagreed with someone making a profit from it. To Frankel if
you created a network like Napster, it shouldn’t be about controlling the network,
but doing everything possible to stop its control: That was good karma. Of course
the Napster that controlled the network also allowed it to form, they facilitated all of
this sharing, but Frankel also saw that this centralisation made it vulnerable to
control and disintegration. If a truly open and free file-sharing network were to
succeed, it would have to operate differently; to Frankel it was an interesting
problem.
5.1 Nullsoft
Justin Frankel began his coding career before high-school, teaching himself by
playing around with his brother's Atari 8-bit computer. By the time he got to high-
school he was proficient enough to run the school network, wrote them an email
program and developed a key logger to log what his teachers typed on their
machines; the latter project more for his own amusement than for school
productivity. After graduating in 1996 he went to Utah University to study computer
science but dropped out after two semesters due to disagreements with his
professors (Kushner, 2004). Like many technically savvy people of the time,
Frankel was picking up a lot of music from the internet, but finding that MP3
software to play it was in short supply. Being the tinkering type Frankel began a
small coding project to make himself some MP3 software that had the functionality
and efficiency he wanted. Shortly after finishing the first build Frankel formed the
company Nullsoft - an anarchic nod to Microsoft - and began distributing his
software which he dubbed WinAmp, short for Windows Amplifier, under a
shareware licence. On his parent's advice Frankel reluctantly added a donation
option to the software where users could voluntarily give him $10 for his work. In
5: GNUtella
95 of 271
6. FastTrack: The Business of Piracy
The history of FastTrack is convoluted at best: A variety of court cases spanning
many years and nations, along with the involvement of many different companies,
all with different levels of responsibility for, and rights to the protocol have made
pinning down its impact tricky. The FastTrack period can be seen as the boom of
peer-to-peer filesharing. With Napster having introduced the habits of digital media
consumption to a mass audience and GNUtella establishing a background
workshop of peer-to peer innovation the space was ready for someone to try and
establish the peer-to-peer network a legitimate method of media distribution.
Though Napster had tried it once, it was possible the media industry would be
more open to negotiations, especially if dealt with upfront rather than the delayed
strong-arm tactics of Napster. This focus on the exploitation of peer-to-peer
networks would provide the basis for shifting the technologies developed under the
illicit banner out from the underground and into wider operation within the culture
industries.
6.1 Zennström & Friis
In 1997 Niklas Zennström met Janus Friis: Zennström was employed by the then
upstart (now behemoth) Swedish telecoms company ‘Tele2’ and had been tasked
with starting up a small ISP business in neighbouring Denmark. Friis was working
in customer support for a rival ISP and saw Zennström’s ad for job openings in the
Copenhagen papers. Friis went for the interview and clicked with Zennström,
devising a business strategy for the new ISP venture that got him hired. From then
on wherever Zennström got transferred by Tele2, he ensured that Friis got
transferred too. Despite being in the ISP business, by 1999 they felt they were
being left out of the innovations going on in media tech.and that rather than
working to make Tele2 bigger, they wanted to start their own venture. Friis moved
into Zennström’s apartment and the two tossed around ideas looking for the next
big hit (Roth, 2004; Davidson, 2005).
Despite the correlation of its initial release in late 1999 with their time
brainstorming, according to Zennström and Friis they were not looking to make the
next Napster. By their account it was Zennström’s experience running an ISP that
6: FastTrack
107 of 271
7. BitTorrent: Revolution in the
Network
7.1 Perfect
It was April 2001 and Bram Cohen had quit his job. Sitting at his dining-room table,
laptop to hand, he was working on a personal project. Tapping away at the
keyboard he reeled out lines of code onto the screen, stopping every now and
again to pace the house before returning to his seat to tap some more. When
Cohen had had a job it had been with a dotcom startup called MojoNation, a
company that was looking to create a peer-to-peer network that could store
encrypted chunks of files across multiple computers. The idea was interesting but
the implementation was still clunky and complicated, not suitable for general public
use and money was running out. This was not unusual for Cohen; over the 1990’s
he had worked as a programmer for a variety of dotcom startups that had gone
bust, every time seeing his project never reach its audience, and it was apparent
to him that MojoNation would be no exception. Tired of never seeing anything
through to completion, Cohen quit. He didn’t have an income to speak of, instead
he was subsisting off of his savings from his string of prior programming jobs and
a well executed regime of transferring debt across 0% introductory rate credit
cards. Without an income it might be assumed that the personal project was
seeking to remedy that, to be the next big dot-com hit: But it wasn’t, it was just an
interesting project. Cohen had noted a problem with the way that the internet
operated and, inspired by the work he had done with MojoNation, knew he had a
solution (Roth, 2005; Thompson, 2005).
As prior P2P developers had noted, the contemporary internet was not designed
for contemporary uses. Increasingly more and more files were being distributed
across the internet, be they music, software, video or images. Napster had clearly
demonstrated a demand for music and the GNUtella model had begun facilitating
larger file transfers. As much as bandwidth was a defining factor when it came to
how fast files could be transferred, a contributing factor was the way in which
contemporary ISP’s had designed the architecture of the commercial net. When
the internet was originally designed as the Government and University focused
7: BitTorrent
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8. Hacking the Market
If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much
would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go. That’s what
happened to the record business.
(Doug Morris CEO of Universal Music Group quoted in Mnookin, 2007)
8.1 Keeping it in the Family
When Michael Robertson was looking to promote his idea of selling music as
MP3s via his new venture MP3.com, he found the labels to be cold to the idea.
They were disinterested, seeing little benefit in these low quality compressed
audio files. When Napster sought licensing, a similar situation occurred: Told by
the courts that they required a license to operate, they found the price set to be
unattainably high and eventually liquidated whilst their only industry ally, BMG,
were punished with liability for Napster’s actions and their eventual consumption
into Vivendi. When Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis’ arranged meetings with
music and film licensing groups in the U.S. they found themselves not in
negotiations as arranged but at the receiving end of accusations and threats.
During the rise of media’s digital distribution, the media industry were out of the
loop and intended to stay there, a decision which at the time, made perfect sense.
The shift from cassette and vinyl to CD had been a sustaining boon at a time when
profits were dropping. The CD, an insider innovation from Sony Corp., revitalised
the recording industry who had found vinyl’s price to have reached a market low at
$8.98. Consumers had become comfortable with the price and any more was
considered to be profiteering. However the CD, sold under the banner of its clean
digital sound and novelty of the new, meant that the standard price could be set at
$16.95 with consumers willing to pay a premium for the format. Though the labels
sold CDs under the banner of high quality digital sound, what brought the
customers flocking was the new capacities of the CD. They were solid and
durable, portable and allowed quick skipping around the album without fiddly re-
adjustment of the phonograph arm or repeated rewinds and fast-forwards to locate
the right spot (Mnookin, 2007). Even if customers already had the music in another
format, the CD, as a way of instantiating music, brought with it a set of capacities
8: Hacking the Market
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Histories of Digital
Distribution

17. 1. Conflict between piracy and the media industries drove legitimate
adoption of digital distribution.
2. The capacities and standards of these services were defined by the
values of hacker subcultures.
3. Digital Distribution has resulted in more varied and interactive media
engagement, also greater control over that engagement.
4. The conflicts have led to the politicisation of piracy, feeding into
issues of surveillance, privacy and cultural freedom.
5. The materiality and design of networks and software as a key actor
in the conflict, often acted as an amplifying conduit for the values of
its designer.
THE OUTPUTS
Key Conclusions

18. THE OUTPUTS

19. ATimeline of Digital Distribution
THE OUTPUTS

20. THE OUTPUTS
Diagram of Associations
Justin
Frankel
Shawn
Fanning
Michael
Robertson
MP3.com My.MP3.com
PressPlay
Vivendi
Napster
Napster
MK II
Skype
Gnutella
Niklas
Zennsstrom
+
Janus Friis
Anthony
Rose
Kazaa
FastTrack
Gene
Kan
Wayne
Rosso
Grokster
Roxio
Roxio
Sharman
Networks

21. THE OUTPUTS
Piracy Network Diagrams

22. THE OUTPUTS
Online Resource

23. THANKYOU