AUSTIN, Texas – Shawn Fanning has been toying with the idea of releasing the Dead Sea Scrolls of the digital music revolution.
The guy who wrote the code that became Napster is talking with Alex Winter – the man responsible for the documentary film Downloaded, detailing his exploits with the file-sharing service – in the hotel room of Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster with him more than a decade ago. Fanning claims he's been "joking" about releasing the code, but Winter is adamant that he follow through.
"Don't joke!" he said. "We want to do it."
"It might be really funny actually … it's just been sitting around," Fanning notes. But he's still not sure. In fact, after all the different deals and attempts to save or squelch Napster, he can't even remember who owns it. He thinks it's Best Buy. Winter thinks it's Rhapsody. (Winter is probably right.)
"It's crazy because the source -- it's basically been sitting in an archive somewhere. It'd be amazing to just release it," Fanning said. He thinks about it a bit more. "Man, I'd be nervous about people seeing it; it's such a spaghetti code."
For tech historians, it would be amazing to see the strings of code that forever changed the relationship between technology and music, but Fanning needs to mull it over. The thought lingers for a moment before Parker enters the room and the conversation begins to shift, but only slightly. Winter's film about Napster premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival here Sunday, and it has everyone thinking about how they used to party back in 1999 (hint: there was a lot of code-writing and lawyering-up).
"I think everybody felt a sense of things weren't quite closed – there was no formal closure," Fanning said after nearly a half-hour of recalling the old days with Parker and Winter. "Alex trying to tell the story in the larger context really did feel like the right way to look at it."
If there was ever a film more suited for SXSW than Downloaded, you'd be hard-pressed to find it. It examines the founding, rise, and fall of Napster, and its resonance with problems still seen in the tech world (Megaupload anyone?) means it perfectly straddles the conference's Interactive and Film worlds. There was even a panel – including the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Perry Barlow – Tuesday to discuss the film, how the tech world has changed (and not changed) since Napster and what should be done to move forward.
But why should anyone listen to the founders of Napster about how to move forward? Because their story has repeated itself many times over the years and there's a good chance it could happen again. It's even been repeated in the companies Napster's founders went on to start, like Spotify, where Parker had trouble convincing record labels to go along with its streaming-music-on-smartphones model. A complex feat, especially for someone who had to reopen relationships with people whose business he had seriously disrupted before.
"They were all kind of OK with it because they felt like they'd won, but really they'd lost – they won the battle but lost the war," Parker said. "[But] the fact that four years ago that was still controversial?"
If past is prologue, here's the prologue, as presented in Downloaded: A young man named Shawn Fanning goes online in November, 1998 under the handle "napster." He uses IRC to solicit input on a project from teenagers known online as "Man0war" (Sean Parker), "Mars" (Ali Aydar) and "Nocarrier" (Jordan Ritter). Fanning wants to build an online community that will allow people to access the music on each others' hard drives. He spends six months writing the code. Of course it eventually hits college campuses and becomes a massive phenomenon. His IRC buddies become his colleagues. Napster starts a digital revolution while draw the ire of the Recording Industry Association of America. The resulting legal fights lead to Napster's eventual -- inevitable? -- demise, but not before it utterly remakes how we listen to music.
"I just felt like this was on of the great moments in human history – and I still do," Barlow says in the film. "But of course great moments in human history usually have an opposition that is exactly proportional to their greatness."
Sound familiar? It should. Swap music file-sharing for leaking diplomatic cables and you have WikiLeaks. Substitute upsetting big media companies for upsetting big media companies and you have Megaupload. But whereas we've already seen what happened to Napster, the dramas around WikiLeaks and Megaupload are still unfurling.
"Because it's not political, because I'm not trying to wrap up Bradley Manning or the Arab Spring, you can just kind of hopefully listen to what these guys are saying about what their intentions were with technology and how it could be used by culture and I think those arguments are absolutely the same across the board – whether you're [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange or Mark Zuckerberg, or whoever you are," director Alex Winter told Wired before SXSW when asked about using Downloaded as an allegory for other online movements.
The other demonstration of Napster's pertinence to our online lives now is its smaller, oft-forgotten role as a social networking service.
"This was the first time I know of, in mainstream history, where people had a social life online. And then after Napster went down, a few years later I start hearing about Friendster, and then of course Myspace and then of course Facebook and all that," Napster's Mac QA engineer Aaron Guadamuz notes in the film. "Everyone just thinks of it as being the file-sharing technology, but I really think it was the seed of that stuff, too."
That may seem like a stretch, but not a very big one considering how much early social networking services traded in connecting people via music taste – see also: Parker's eventual role in Facebook.
Despite the Napster story's relevance to present predicaments like those facing WikiLeaks or Megaupload, Downloaded doesn't offer solutions. Seeing where Fanning and Parker were derailed provides no answers to how other disrupters might avoid the same fate. That was intentional. Winter didn't want to offer a solution that, he believes, his subjects are still working out.
"The future is unfolding – everybody's in the trenches," Winter said. "That's what I love about these guys, they're in the trenches working this stuff out ten years later. They didn't go back to their corner with blood on their face and just go into the toiletries industry. Everybody's trying to work this stuff out."
Downloaded is a VH1 Rock Doc that will have a theatrical run before hitting cable, but Winter says that – true to his film's mission – the ultimate destination for his movie is digital download. Which begs the question: Is he worried about piracy? Wired spoke with Winter before he even left for Austin to find out if that was plaguing him.
"This isn't a Creative Commons movie and I'm really interested in Creative Commons and I think what the guys did with Away From Keyboard is really brilliant and fits really perfectly fits the ethos of the whole Pirate Bay movement really well and very snugly," Winter said. "For me, with Downloaded of course it's going to end up on torrent sites, that's just part of the fabric of the world we live in."
