NetWorld! What People Are Really Doing on the Internet and What It Means to YouRothman, David H.
General
NetWorld! What People Are Really Doing on the Internet and What It Means to You
Rothman, David H.
Internet
Then an event happened that was almost as significant to IUMA as was the
discovery of MPEG. Lord discovered the World Wide Web. “None of us,”
Patterson recalled, “had any clue what it was. I think it was in
December of ’93 that we got a hold of a copy of Mosaic.” They tried it
out in a faculty lounge at U.C. Santa Cruz. “There wasn’t really much
content on the Web at all. It was pretty much, like, weather satellites.
We realized from that point on that we could really do something with
taking the music and the pictures and using the World Wide Web as the
way to present everything. People would be able to look at the album
cover, read the text, see ‘play’ buttons. You know, press the play
button, hear the music, and all that sort of thing.
“So,” Patterson said, “we called up the guy we knew from maintaining the
FTP archives at U.C. Santa Cruz, and asked him what he knew about the
World Wide Web.” Overnight he learned how to set IUMA up on the Web. His
name was Jon Luini, and he would become a partner in IUMA, the co-czars’
“Kaiser.”
Meanwhile IUMA’s popularity kept growing, and soon the archives landed
on SunSite UNC, a big digital library sponsored by Sun Micro Systems at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. IUMA would even make it
to servers in Europe, so that people there could enjoy the music without
tying up the trans-Atlantic connections. Other big companies, such as
Silicon Graphics, took an interest in IUMA and donated computers and
other gear.
But how were Patterson and Lord—and their musicians—going to make money
off the Internet, where “free” was a religion and where commercial audio
might be pirated? I loved the many legitimately free pleasures of the
Net. It was truly for sharing. IUMA, of course, was offering lots of
music at no charge. Via the World Wide Web, I myself was giving away a
book chapter I’d written for a forthcoming information science
collection; and I hoped that at least some material from _NetWorld!_
would be retrievable without any money changing hands. But what to do
about the darker side of “free?”
Sympathetic to the cash-short but clearly a realist, Lord told how
casually kids copied computer games for each other. “There’s a complete
underground going on,” he said, and he told how young hackers had
secretly turned the IUMA archives into a site for stolen software. The
mischief was hard to spot just by doing the usual check of the storage
area.
“We deleted their stuff,” Lord recalled, “and left a note saying, ‘Leave
us alone, you Rug Rats,’ because it was clear there were 13-year-olds
doing it. Some of the biggest pirates in the world are younger than 15.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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