Ahoy! Mateys

Reading the last chapter of Click, I was struck by how important filesharing has become integral to the way in which music was consumed. The example he used about the Arctic monkeys just proved what some artists (Radiohead) have been saying all along. Who's going to take a chance on new music when you have to pay $18 for a single CD? It's become clear that free mp3s are now integral to promoting new bands or even new albums by established ones (Thom Yorke claims that the popularity of Kid A was mainly due to napster).
As a musician, I would like to weigh in on this. David Weinberger talked about how data is becoming so cheap that soon it will be essentially free. This is an extremely important development. Existing intellectual property law is based on the assumption that distributing content ois not free. Manufacturing books and LPs takes a lot of resources, and its only reasonable to expect some sort of financial compensation for them. However, when you can just post your ebook, or mp3s online, it costs next to nothing (or in some cases actually nothing). I'm not saying that there should be no form of compensation at all, but, using existing copyright laws to regulate online content is like using laws about horse-drawn carriages to regulate the auto industry. They just are not applicable.
The record industry has been enormously short-sighted, and has essentially ensured that the future innovations in music (since I believe that content ultimately will always have to adapt to its form) will happen without them.
In Europe, there is an increasingly powerful movement of pirate parties, arguing these exact points. in Swedish parliament, the Green, left, and even the moderate parties have adopted this position.
But if everything is free, how can artists survive? Well, in the short term, alternative means of compensation can be provided. This has already happened in classical music in the 1940s. Since living composers were no longer able to live off of the revenue from publishing their works (largely due to the popularity of recordings) ASCAP worked out a system where registered composers would get paid a certain amount of money determined by how frequently their works were performed. This system could easily be adapted to other forms of music, especially if revenue was generated by advertising (like Hulu).
Or maybe web 2.0 will lead to many more drastic changes in how we view art. In some ways (with mash-ups) we are seeing the rebirth of a genuine folk culture, where the public produces its own art, music, and discourse, rather than relying on the big media conglomerates to tell them what to listen to.
Either way file-sharing is so common, that simply due to volume, it will continue to spread regardless of what governments or content providers do.

Astroturfing

Web 2.0, is supposedly the peoples internet. Anyone can run a blog, start an event on facebook, or edit wikipedia. Manny thinkers from leftist academics to business have hailed this new version of the web as the emergence of a genuinely participatory culture. However, the reality of the internet (like technology in general) is much less cut and dry.
The same resources used to initate a grassroots campaign can just as easily be used to create a fake grass-roots campaign. In fact, this is becoming commonn enough that there is now a word for it: Astroturfing.
This was brought to my attention in a series of articles published at the alternative news site, exiledonline devoted to the Rick Snatelli and the Chicago tea party campaign. Conservative NBC commentator Rick Santelli posted an angry blog entry about how fed up he was with Obama's Stimulus Plan, and announced his plan to hole a "Chicago Tea party" to protest. Hours later websites such chicagoteaparty.com sprang up, and a nationwide "tea party" movement was set up. There were blogs, facebook events, twitter "tweets", the whole shebang. Yet, not many showed up to these protests despite the huge internet presence or media coverage.
As it turns out, the whole thing was funded by Freedomworks, a right-wing thinktank, run by Dick Armey. May of the tea party domain names were purchased before Santelli's blog post. The whole thing was not to form a movement, but to give the appearance of one.
This plan backfired dramatically. Santelli's scheduled interview was dropped from the Daily Show, and I'm sure that this debaucle is not going to help him keep his job.
It's pretty interesting to know that a purely digital fake portest can have a the same effect as a real one.

Medical Marijuana and Mirgraines

Asoflate, the debate around medical marijuana has intensified. In part, I think this has todowith abilityofpeopleto easily share information using the internet. In this case, the ability of migraine sufferers to share information about their conditions has actually lead to the (re)discovery of arguably the most effective treatment of migraines.
Migraines are difficult to treat because it is not entirely known what causes them. The only way to treat them is to try to prevent them, and then mitigating the symptoms. Migraines are treating with a variety of drugs some of which (ergot for example) have some pretty serious side effects.
Enter the word wide web.
A migraine sufferer (awesomely enough the actual term is "migraineur") tried smoking pot, found out that not only did the headaches and nausea go away, but the migraines showed up less often. Other migraine sufferers tried it, and it worked. Informal sharing of information created a new treatment alternative.
Actually up until 1942 (even after cannabis was declared illegal) it was considered the most effective treatment for migraines. With the mass fear of beatniks and hippies, Cannabis was dropped from the pharmacopeia. It is only within the last 20 years that the medical community is even considering cannabis as a treatmentformigraines.