"But now, in the second stage of Internet evolution, when it comes to copyright issues, that attitude has disappeared. So with the emergence of P2P architectures (which are being used to exchange music in ways that upset the music industry), rather than the court responding in the way that it did in Reno v. ACLU, the courts are in a knee-jerk way acting to shut down this emerging technology on the view that unless you stop it, it will be the end of copyright." (Lessig, interview with O'Reilly and Koman 2005)

Indeed, after the courts first put the clampdown on Napster in 2000, we have witnessed an avalanche of aggressive tactics from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who seem to have an endless supply of funds and a will-to-litigation to match. The RIAA's masssive efforts to protect the coming obsolescence of their business model, in coordination with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Copyright Extension Act, have made it possible for the RIAA to put pressure on university systems administrators and Fortune 500 companies alike. Preying on administrators and CEO's greatest common fear—liability—the RIAA has attempted to outsource some of the policework to middle-managers and university IT personnel, and even directly suing individual users in after-Napster networks such as Kazaa, Bearshare, Morpheus, imesh, or any other P2P trading networks. In Napster's wake, the production/consumption distinction (so cherished by publishers, the RIAA and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) noticably dissolved when communities of programmers and users brought a new wave of filesharing protocols to the Internet. This trend first became apparent in Kazaa's decentralized practice of doing business. After Kazaa was sued in 2001, they disappeared completely from the radar, only to remerge with a new business structure that was hardly a structure, at all. Kazaa’s new armature was decentralized completely, dispersed worldwide. Server, domain, license, advertising, and all parts of the machinery, including the code itself, were dispersed in separate nodes, with geophysical touchstones in tax-haven island locations, Denmark, and Australia. RIAA subpoenas might have pressed the issue, but it was Kazaa’s users (up to 60 million at the time) that produced this model of business in the rhythmic activity they engaged. Kazaa learned from their supernodes that decentralization, if intensified, could add exponential value to the circulation of information.

By that time Limewire, Bearshare, Grokster, and many other brand names surfaced, it became apparent that the rhetoric of business and law no longer provided the best descriptions for what had literally become a movement. Or even more precisely: after Napster, the movement and resonance that has always sustained creative and energetic practice now rose to the surface and garnered the attention of diverse communities bringing together diverse interests and practices on a common surface, a “commons” surface, even. Glenbrook South High School in Illinois hosts a number of helpful online learning modules, and physics instructor Tom Henderson's lesson on musical instruments in the online Physics Classroom explains that “an instrument can be forced into vibrating at one of its harmonics (with one of its standing wave patterns) if another interconnected object pushes it with one of those frequencies. This is known as resonance— when one object vibrating at the same natural frequency of a second object forces that second object into vibrational motion."

Jesse Walker opens his review of Joseph Menn’s book All the Rave, which appeared in the Washington Post on June 8, 2003, with a telling statement from Hilary Rosen, the chief executive of the RIAA from 1999-2003, when the RIAA devised and launched their aggressive litigation policies against programers, listeners, and students. Hilary Rosen, Chief of the Recording Industry Association of America, put her finger on the contradiction after her trade group sued the upstart enterprise. "Your biggest problem," she told its CEO, "is that instead of a business, you created a movement. And it's impossible to convert it” (Walker, 2003 ). What is interesting about resonance, though, is that all you can do is convert it, or, more accurately, let it resonate. One thing you cannot do is own it.

In January 2003, the RIAA contacted systems administrators at universities, pressuring them to look at the records that by law say that outside parties cannot subpoena student records. Once they got their foot in the door, warnings were sent to universities whose bandwidth harbored semi-P2P LAN hubs of illegal copyright use. Then, in February, the RIAA sent letters to 300 companies, some of them Fortune 500 companies. Perhaps inspired by numbers showing that illegal file-sharing was up 300% from 2002, despite the ceromonious crack-down on Napster just two years prior, and coupling that with statistics that show 30-40% of this activity was performed during “regular” business hours, the RIAA’s packet threatened businesses and provided proof (IP addresses, illegal files shared and the networks used to upload and dissemenate unauthorized copies) of filesharing activity. Also provided were the full description of the stiff penalties these activities were subject to, under law. Suddenly, the law seemed to overwrite the entertainment industry's inroads into higher education . The law now included the DMCA, and the Napster ruling, and the Copyright Extension Act that works most directly to maintain old distinctions between “creative original ideas” and the protection of those who develop them on the one hand, and “consumers” of those ideas who have a “right” to purhase them. These penalties include legal fees, damages/losses suffered by the owner, and, somehow, all potential profits for the pirate. Berkeley law professor Pamela Samuelson observered that these “damages” could easily be gerrymandered into astronomical sums, or, as she put it at the time, “kazillions,” plus $150,000 per work shared illegally. Would we have to rewrite our curriculum? Would Internet law become progymnasmata and necessary prerequisite for any rhetorical training? By March of 2003, it appeared that we wouldn't have to go too far to teach these exigencies: the RIAA actually sued four students at three different schools, including Princeton and Michigan Tech. MTU’s presiddent was outraged that his school was not given more time to approach this new problem. In April, Penn State unplugged 220 students who apparently were not frightened enough by letters and informative web sites sent and uploaded after the RIAA reached out aggressively in March. After a year which saw 3,000 subpoena requests to ISPs and almost 400 copyright infringement actions, the court's January decision was reversed in December. But administrators at Penn State had already seen enough. Penn State president Graham Spanier and RIAA president Carey Sherman, as members of the Joint Committee of Higher Education and Entertainment, established a direct connection between entertainment and education. Without consulting students and faculty, without a pre-licensing pilot study, Penn State signed a licensing agreement with "new Napster," a sanctioned p2p service to be paid for by student technology fees.

Here, we can finally find, in a wash of widely broadcasted business and legal rhetoric, a reminder that, the “Napster effect” is only a name for the collaborative writing and decentralized circulation of information that was already in effect before Napster. The concept "Napster effect," in effect, reflects, by the built-in brand name that makes the idea portable and sharable, an unpredictability--an unpredictability that results when branding predictably works to arrest control of a definition, idea...or ideas.

Furthermore, as the post-Napster boom of P2P clients showed us, network pedagogies— communities of users and writers—emerge precisely to respond to constraints such as the  Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which applies the proprietary logic of the Copyright Act of 1976 to digital and networked media. When centralizing mechanisms install locks on connectivity and put blocks on the “natural tendencies” of infodynamic flows (information wants to be free!), such measures end up functioning like thermodynamic gradients. Community-forming and ecstatic practices of music have always emerged to degrade these imposed limits. Musical ethics of participation and entrainment translate into an expanded rhetorical practice in p2p. Prevailing attitudes and infrastructures in higher education have not been able to respond to this expansion of rhetorical practice, save for the deer-in-the-headlights lock-down approaches exemplified by the case of PSU -Napster. While the installation of such gradients on essentially dynamic and Dionysian technologies of knowledge-sharing and collective problem-solving does function in an almost elemental way in larger rhythmic cycles (the Napster effect), policy has not yet been able to celebrate this joyful process.

In the wake of old Napster’s demise at the hands of the RIAA, and the avalanche of individual lawsuits the RIAA handed down to students in universities nationwide, it is at first easy to see why writing programs shy away from filesharing. At the same time, however, if we bear in mind the law of unintended consequences, and follow another thread in the post-Napster narrative—the network pedagogy saga that shows how participants in complex networks of shared information came together and wrote new open source filesharing clients in an overwhelming and global testimony to the fundamental compulsion to form a commons... Rhythm—connections and blockages of connections—allows us to get a handle on the rhetorical softwares borne out of the sort of complex emergence we find in vibrant networks of exchange.

The case of PSU-Napster brought myopic legal trends to campus, but at the same time, made it necessary to test the uses music and noise might have for rhetorical training. In this sense, "noise" as controversy is an easy link from the "personal" dissonance that registers when our presuppositions don't quite mesh. The resulting noise—whether felt generally as \"controversy,\"  registering specifically as a perceived dissonance produced by cultural difference, or  deployed scientifically to describe rampant and generative complexity and/or redundancy  in information—is prerequisite to and essential for developing a sustainable writing process.

The question on my mind was this: how can PSU-Napster be supported, or leveraged into usefulness? Or, if necessary, subverted? In order to find out, I would have to bring a set of premises to the software itself, and bring these questions to my students. The agreement was, after all, an available means of focusing perception on the conditions of writing common to the university community.

The time had come to test one major premise of my research: students arrive, “out of the box,” so to speak, already steeped in the ways of remix culture. At the same time, in light of the local and exigent brand-name “mash-up” (Napster as Commons, Penn State as University) providing a spectacular display of the rhetorical form and function of definition at a systemic level, it became absolutely necessary to test another hypothesis, as well. In good faith, I would find out what students could do with new Napster. I offered this notion to my students: when Penn State forged a licensing agreement with Napster, it provided students and teachers of writing with a fantastic resource for compositional practice.

While I disagreed with the blanket term "piracy," I did share a presupposition with adminstrators: students today comprise a new generation, a student body who deal with information fundamentally as filesharers. Unlike many of the administrators who manage educational delivery systems and the lobbyists who endeavor to encrypt creativity in legal technologies of control, students of the Napster/post-Napster era enter universities already experienced in digital media, more familiar with emergent forms of writing than the print-based forms of writing which have for so long informed our writing curricula and course design. As it turns out, this hypothesis would need to be qualified somewhat. And by no means did I figure this out on my own. But that's another story...

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