COLUMN: Peer to peer is nothing to fear
Ever since Napster opened the Pandora’s box of world-wide music sharing, music executives have been screaming about the end of artists and creativity as we know it.
In computer lingo it is called Peer to Peer (P2P). Of course none of these people are really your peers, they are just random despots with a computer and a broadband connection. The music industry’s fear is that all this music sharing will reduce CD sales and thus lower the economic incentive to produce quality music. In theory, one person in Kiev could buy the new Smashing Pumpkins release and “share” it with everyone from Bangalore to Fairbanks. In reality, music listeners are not organized enough to make that happen.
Should we even care? Oh my gosh, you mean there might not be anybody coming up through the ranks to replace Britney Spears and Snoop Dog? Like, nobody will be willing to be rock or hip-hop stars if they can only make $500,000 instead of millions a year? You mean they might actually have to tour and perform live instead of doing music videos and collecting royalty checks? I feel almost bad for them. If the whole music industry went on strike, I think our species would still survive. We might even learn to sing and play instruments ourselves.
Wait, we already used to do that before the music industry took over. So this would be, like all retro, you know?
But mainly I want to say, “Hey you art-school brats welcome to humor world. Humor is and always has been P2P.” The written word and especially humor is shared and plagiarized so regularly that nobody even notices anymore.
Just because you came up with some cool three-cord progressions and trendy hair styles doesn’t make you any different.
Jokes are almost by definition P2P. In fact people often reference the person who found the funny thing rather than the person who actually wrote it. Every day you probably get some e-mail that has been forwarded 20 times and everybody is just thanking Phil for finding this funny nugget somewhere on the Internet.
The same goes for the spoken word. When was the last time you heard somebody say, “I got this really great joke from Bob Finley in Lincoln, Nebraska, want to hear it?” I’m guessing never. People just start off with, “Two proboscis monkeys walk into a bar … blah, blah, blah.” The person telling the joke is rewarded with a laugh and you try to remember it so you can tell it at your next dinner party.
For the most part this is innocent fun because you aren’t making any money from this joke. The worst purveyors of P2P humor theft are the conference speakers who charge $5,000 to be funny and all they do is retell stories they culled from books of humorous anecdotes.
Nobody cares about who wrote the original joke. I just about shot the TV when Tom Hanks, who won the best actor Oscar for Forest Gump, thanked everyone in the universe except the guy (Winston Groom) who wrote the book that the movie is based on!
You have my written permission to share this rant.
Dennis Hinkamp may or may not have used Napster inadvertently to share old ABBA songs. Contact him at dennish@ext.usu.edu.