“Megaupload” (Used 2 times)

I'm moderating a panel on The Code of the Blogosphere at SXSW this Saturday, March 17th at 2pm (info).

Description:

How did MP3 blogging become such an integral part of the music community, despite its unresolved legality? The blogosphere has found a makeshift balance between the web's massive communal archive; the on-demand, curated experience that music listeners crave; and the degree of rule-bending that the music industry will allow (or, in many cases, solicit) in the name of promotion. While artists and publicists fight for blog coverage, the industry's legal arm usually turns a blind eye. However, those who break The Code (i.e. posting a pre-release album in its entirety) will pay the price. And there still remains a disconnect where misunderstandings lead to DMCA takedowns, blog deletions, and even domain seizures. Do these scenarios call for an official "Blogger's Code?" Or will music in the cloud forever change the role of the blogger?

Panelists:

* David Greenwald (Freelance Journalist / MP3 Blogger since 2005 @ Rawkblog)
* Leslie Madill (Head of Marketing and PR/ North America @ Ninja Tune)
* Christopher Bavitz (Clinical Instructor & Asst Dir, Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School/Berkman Center)
* Anthony Volodkin (CEO/Founder, Hype Machine)
* Todd Goldstein (Musician: ARMS)

Of course the idea was inspired by my work here at the FMA, where we share music legally and often under Creative Commons licenses which let people know that they can share, too. Meanwhile, the blogosphere has developed its own code which doesn't care as much about copyright because it's not only influenced by the law, but also by the architecture of the web, by social norms, and by the promotional value of blog coverage. This framework (and the diagram above) comes from Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture. It's interesting to watch these forces interact across the blogosphere like tectonic plates, and sometimes erupt in a one-sided volcano as in 2010's "Music Blogocide," the Dajaz1 seizure, and the aftermath of Megaupload's shutdown.

The goal of this panel is to determine what makes for a "healthy" music blogosphere, and how to sustain it through code. There's no live stream so if SXSW doesn't make a recording available afterwards, hopefully a blogger will post a bootleg.

The day after last week's inspiring protest against overreaching anti-piracy laws, the US Department of Justice demonstrated that they don't need those laws, anyway.  They just went ahead and unilaterally shut down Megaupload, the world's most popular cyberlocker.  Rumor has it that similar sites like MediaFire and 4shared are under investigation and have been deleting files, while FileSonic preemptively disabled all sharing features.

As a result, much of the history of recorded sound has been made inaccessible to the public.  I'm talking, of course, about the music blogosphere.  The best music blogs aren't pirates.  They are libraries, sound archivists and music preservationists sharing recordings that would not otherwise be available.  And now sites like Global Groove, Mutant Sounds, and Holy Warbles have lost large swaths of the material they'd salvaged from obscurity.

Fortunately not all of the music on Mutant Sounds has been lost. They didn't use Megaupload exclusively.  This Karen Cooper Complex album comes out of the vibrant Richmond VA experimental scene from the late 70s/early 80s, and it was never even released until it appeared on the Free Music Archive (previously featured here, and on Mutant Sounds here).  These are the types of genuine "Artyfacts" I would love to host more of, but since we do things by the book here at the FMA, it's often difficult to track down rightsholders to get official permission.

It always bothered me to discover artists sharing their own original work via an untrustworthy website like Megaupload.  I never liked their approach of charging for quicker access to files, and their advertisements (including the Mega Song) always felt kinda icky.  The Mega Conspiracy alleges that Megaupload was actually designed to profit from media piracy through tactics like a reward for users who pirated films before their release date.  Paramount Pictures claimed that Mega sites made as much as $300 million a year in large part by selling ads and charging for access to copyrighted work.  That figure is from a great SSRC article titled "Meganomics."  Author Joe Karaganis describes how most cyberlockers and torrent sites don't profit nearly that much if at all, and he proposes that we factor this in to a clearer definition of what it means to infringe on a "commercial scale."

Back to the site that tipped that scale: even if they were just the new sleazy middleman in the distribution chain, millions of users had come to rely on Megaupload for very legitimate uses.  Now their files are gone.  But they are not lost, thanks to the nature of online sharing which necessitates the creation of new copies.  It is inspiring to see the Mutant Sounds community come together along these lines, re-upping files from their personal collections to restore the communal archive (link).

Long live the blogosphere!