Its been over 5 years since the first MP3 Summit where the concept of the jukebox in the sky was hotly debated. The promise of the jukebox in the sky was to make all music available to users everywhere. Users could tap into the jukebox at home, at work, in their car or hiking up a mountain.
Five years later and the iPod is the closest thing to this jukebox we have -- not exactly what people talked about back then. With the current legal climate I'm not expecting the RIAA and its cronies to deliver this jukebox anytime soon.
Community wireless networks have a much better chance of delivering on this promise. Assume for a moment that wireless networks have come of age and in urban areas dense wireless networks blanket the neighborhoods.
Now lets assume that computer users make their music collections available via tools like iCommune. If you can aggregate the music collections of dozens/hundreds of people around you, you'll get a virtual music collection that approaches the jukebox in the sky.
This jukebox won't have everything under the sun (which physical jukebox does?), but it will have large amounts of music ready to be played, right now without waiting for it to download, which is not a bad start.
While aggregated wireless music collections won't provide everything to everyone everywhere, they do have some interesting qualities that are worth exploring.
If the community around you has the music, do you need to download all of the music to your machine? Better get another bigger harddrive, because the community will have more music than you have harddrive space. So, I hope that people will truely start sharing their collections instead of actually copying them as the current file sharing networks do. And if we're just sharing and not copying does that fall under fair use? (Never mind that fair use has been erradicated in the last few years).
And finally, if wireless networks don't rely on traditional ISPs, it conceivable to put firewalls/packet filters at locations where the wireless net connects to a traditional ISPs, so that the RIAA cannot even see these wireless jukeboxes?
Traditional ISPs unwittingly act as DMCA chokepoints, and if firewalls hide the activity of wireless networks, then how will the RIAA combat these jukeboxes in the sky?
Are community wireless jukeboxes viable? What do you think?
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Something similiar, but not as easy / nice
I have a wifi caravan node setup with 11 random streams available on ports 8000 through 8010 which are playing random tracks from a playlist that is everything uploaded to this shared caravan storage partition (right now about 7276 songs).
Hopefully we will have people driving along down to san francisco listening to tunes via the "great wifi jukebox in the sky" (that happens to be traveling down I-5 in a vehicle :-)
Anyone who likes the music can then copy what they like via http, smb, nfs, ftp, rsync, or even tftp (among others). People can upload what they will and this will be added to the random playlists.
I'd like to be able to customize this in a number of different ways (i.e. give the user a web interface and let them kick off a stream that matches) but haven't gotten that far yet.
The caravan page is at: http://cubicmetercrystal.com/wificaravan/
Two Comments
Regarding the fair use point: I think this type of music-sharing network is outside the bounds of fair use. Even putting aside the question of copying the actual music file (let's assume you can only listen to available music while attached to this network), I see problems. I don't have a background in law, so my opinion is merely subjective, but I've never heard of fair use being applied to sharing among dozens, much less thousands (millions?) of people you don't know. As I understand it, fair use means (more or less) that you can share a book/recording/etc. with close friends and family. Sharing would include the implication that when your friend has your book, you can't use it until he gives it back. There's another angle to fair use, in which people have been defending the right to transform the medium on which they store the product (CD to MP3, computer to computer, etc.), but that concept doesn't cover sharing so much as an individual's storage and retrieval choices. So I'd suggest that community sharing of music won't be a great catalyst to advance the fair use argument.
As far as the question of enforcement: If the networks are pervasive in dense urban areas, it wouldn't take long for law enforcement to start driving around to find them. Warrants might be difficult without specific information about the sources of each file (you can't just knock on every door in the neighborhood, at least most of the time), but I assume it wouldn't be difficult to triangulate the locations of individual base stations. It's (probably) a lot easier to be anonymous over the entire Intranet than over a local wireless network. Bust enough people, and the whole system falls apart from fear.
It's a great idea, and I wish we could just do it. Maybe some day, with enough wins for the fair use camp and a re-tooling of the music industry, it could become a legal reality. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
shh!
shhhhhhhh!
What they don't know won't hurt them ;^)
Community is the hard part(?)
It seems increasingly viable, ie. easy, at least on a Mac.
Apple's Rendezvous implementation with iTunes is designed to do this, and wireless access points seem to be improving to make this kind of thing more possible. Apple's Airport base stations now come with external antennae ports and do wireless bridging. I'm certainly planning to set this up at home (and test how viable it is at work, ie. how much bandwidth it sucks up).
It seems the hitch is creating a community which is big enough to provide enough music; which has enough crossover in taste to make it worthwhile; and whose members are close enough (a few Km?) to create a network.
Then there is the problem of community culture: for example, I was interested in a free wireless network in my area (before broadband was affordable), but the main participants seemed to enjoy the very technical process more than the goal. Thus, it wasn't a very populist kind of network. I imagine it is still in a state where there are lots of nodes with unbridgable gaps between them, and off-the-shelf components that anyone can use have (or will have) become available long before they have finished their home-grown versions.
Re: "If the community around you has the music, do you need to download all of the music to your machine?"
Check this out: the network is the hard drive
http://canarie.ca/press/releases/01-02-07.html
Canarie, who developed the Canada's Ca*Net3 network, have done experiments making an optical network act like a nation-wide optical storage device, 8000km in diameter. Rather than storing data on traditional hard drives, the data is kept spinning around the network at the speed of light.
I wonder what the RIAA would make of files which are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere?
Am