Tower of Sleep: lukesimcoe reblogged you: Cool idea… but flawed. We shared music files...
lukesimcoe reblogged you:
Cool idea… but flawed. We shared music files because they were small, and bandwith was scarce. We had been doing the same thing with other kinds of texts — documents, pictures, gifs — prior to the advent of Napster. The revolution was already under way, and…
lukesimcoe would probably know best about file sharing (including stealing and such) on the Inter-webs, I’m sure. And since we’re talking about antecedents, “home taping” used to be “killing the music industry”, too, wasn’t it? I think, still, that everything about the situation with music file sharing — from the abundant availability of digital copies to copy perfectly, to the fast-growing (now countless) number of people involved, to the dramatic response from (and intense decline of) the “majors”, to the fostering of a much different model for producing, distributing, selling, and consuming music — makes Napster (by now a euphemism, it should be said, for music file sharing generally) pretty important and revealing. If not wholly “revolutionary” alone, for sure, it’s a key “from quantitative to qualitative” type shift, I’d say. Anyway, an actual timeline that enumerates and tracks file sharing of different types of content, while probably impossible to produce, would be very interesting to read.
