The crowd makes the ballgame

There are some horrible diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cystic fibrosis, certain cancers and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that involve 'misfolded proteins'. If biologists can better understand protein folding, then it might shed light into how to cure these diseases.

Stanford University's Folding@home project is designed to run simulations of protein folding on the idle time of the general public's PCs and games consoles. The project claims that a million CPUs have been made available to the project and 50 research papers have been published using data from the project.

There are at least a `dozen of these projects `_out there.

What is a library in the technological age?

Ugarit was a important trading port in what is now called Syria around the 15th century BC. And it had a library. So for at least 3500 years, humans have been writing books and sharing copies of them. For the majority of the population, the idea of private copies of books only came into use about 500 years ago, and only really took off for everyone about 200 years ago.

The idea of a library is that you can accumulate all the works of literature and art, the sum of human creativity, and make them available for as any people as possible. The ancient library of Alexandria claimed to have every book in existence. Cory Doctorow describes peer to peer filesharing as follows:

> P2P networks comprise the largest library of human creativity ever assembled.

From your home computer, you can type some search terms into P2P software or search engine and receive almost every movie produced in a format that works on your computer, not just Hollywood movies, you can get Asian film, Scandinavian film, Latin American film, African film. It is impossible to buy much of this stuff from any shop, and the stuff that you can buy, will take several weeks to be imported for you, and will be in the wrong region code anyway, so you have to hack your DVD player or import a DVD player to go with it. The same goes for music, everything is just available.

Research on file-sharing is of course difficult, as is phoning people up and asking them about if they sometime 'forget' to buy a parking ticket or do they look at dodgy pictures online. However, the estimates are always the majority of broadband Internet users, and with young technically educated users, the number starts to head towards almost everyone.

Peer to Peer - Artist to Patron

Helping university researchers to cure Alzheimer's is welcomed by everyone, it is not controversial at all, as long as the software is efficient, that computers are not being left on eating electricity for nothing but are actually processing data.

However, file-sharing is far more problematic, it changes the way creative industries work. In lowering the marginal cost of creative works to more or less zero, it is making all other distribution methods redundant, in the same way that the invention of the car dramatically reduced the need for stables.

Let's take the example of music. In previous centuries, musicians derived their income from live performances, working the venues and building up local networks of fans and patrons. For 50 years or so in the twentieth century, a small percentage of musicians gained global fame and almost infinite wealth through sales of records, enabled by large record companies. This seems to now be drawing to a close, and the musicians may need to go back to the traditional direct connection between fans and musicians.

This will not be a problem for musicians, most people are decent and most people are prepared to support their favourite musicians, not least because live gigs are good fun to go to. This is however a problem for the record companies. They are merely the distribution channel, they are the stables, they will need to change or die, and for us it doesn't matter either way. As long as the government gets out of the way, demand leads supply. If the old record companies do not want to meet the demand then others will.

Fearing the crowd

> "This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings." > > Walter Lippmann

Sadly, most record companies responded not by coming to market with new distribution methods, but by panicking. They have tried three strategies. Firstly, they stuck their head and the sand and hoped the new technological revolution would go away, the ostrich strategy. The second strategy was attempting to get the government and ISPs to erect legal and technological barriers. The third strategy was to sue music fans.

None of these have worked, and will never work. You cannot take the technology away, people have large broadband connections and powerful machines, deal with it.

Web 2.0 VS Democratic computing

There is an interesting video online, the context is a morning conference breakfast where Professor Eben Moglen is supposed to be talking about licencing, particularly the GPLv3 and Affero GPLv3. However the host Tim O'Reilly introduces the talk as licencing in the 'Web 2.0 era', Eben Moglen clarifies his title, that Web 2.0 era doesn't exist, and when Tim O'Reilly asks why, it goes progressively downhill from there.

They both seem to be tired and grumpy, and it proves the rule that you should never invite a lawyer to a party, and O'Reilly never really manages to get his composure or get back into the discussion. The audience seem to be asleep too as they make no response to anything. The two of them never really got onto the topic (where presumably Moglen was supposed to explain the difference between the Affero GPL and the normal GPL)

Anyway here was the talk in Flash. However, I managed to get the quicktime file out so I could watch it in a normal media player.

Eben Moglen argues that there are two changes both based on the rapid development of computer hardware and the resulting increase in computer power.

This ubiquity of cheap processing power and storage has allowed the accumulation of extreme amounts of computing power in global web services such as Google, YouTube, Facebook and so on. Half a billion people can use Google's services everyday and Google has the severs available to handle it. This would not have been possible before.

However, Moglen argues that this is only half the story, the ubiquity of cheap hardware has enabled individuals to also have large amounts of computing power. He points out that there is more computing power in the laptops of conference audience in front of him, than there was in the whole of IBM twenty years ago. For Moglen, this change is more significant than the 'Web 2.0' services that Tim O'Reilly champions, such as Facebook or Myspace, which Moglen describes as "what the kids are doing this week".

Therefore, according to Moglen, the focus should be on what these individuals are doing with this power and on what freedoms they have. In part 4, we will look at what this might mean in practice.