Tears of rage
Mourning the loss of a young innovator who knew that collaboration spurs great achievement
“I READ THE news today, oh boy.” For most of us, John Lennon’s “A Day in the Life” anchors the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album with its wistful acoustic guitar and melancholy lyric. When I read the news of Gene Kan’s death in the San Francisco Chronicle at breakfast, the song sprang to mind. Thanks to Gene Kan and his friends, it sprang to life on my computer when I got to work.
Gene Kan was the visible presence of Gnutella, the peer-to-peer platform that expanded on Napster’s server-based directory by sharing not just the files but the directory itself. Later, Kan founded InfraSearch, a search technology based on Gnutella, and moved to Sun’s JXTA p-to-p development team when Sun bought the company.
Sun released a statement calling Kan’s death an accident, but Weblog postings by friends and associates hinted at struggles with depression. The Associated Press reported the coroner’s office will likely rule his death a suicide. He was 25.
Another song, and its genesis, springs to mind: “Tears of Rage,” by Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel. As the Beatles worked on Sgt. Pepper in Abbey Road studios in London and Dylan recovered from a motorcycle accident in Woodstock, N.Y., he and his group of back-up musicians — soon to be known as The Band — wrote, arranged, and recorded songs on a home tape recorder in the basement of a house in nearby Saugerties, N.Y.
Years later, Manuel told me how the song came to be: He was sitting at the upright piano when Dylan walked up and placed a sheet of paper in front of him.
“We carried you in our arms/on Independence Day …”
The words ran down the page, without chords or other notation. Dylan, 26, asked Manuel, “Do you have something for this?” And Richard Manuel, 24, said, “Sure,” and wrote the music.
As rumors spread of the recordings, various versions of The Basement Tapes circulated as bootleg records, eventually prompting an “official” release of some of the songs in 1975. In effect, The Basement Tapes was the opening shot of the peer-to-peer revolution.
“Tears of rage, tears of grief/Why must I always be the thief?”
In July 2000 Gene Kan testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “Music on the Internet: Is There an Upside to Downloading?” Others on the stage included the CEOs of Napster and MP3.com, the president of Sony Records’ New Technology division, and co-founders of Metallica and The Byrds.
In an age of presidential language-parsing, Kan’s words sprang from a gentler time, even in the face of a roomful of lawyers, elected and otherwise. “Downloadable music attracts all manner of people. Recording industry employees, doctors, lawyers, students, adolescents — the list goes on. The people who use Napster are not criminals. They are not the thugs you see on the evening news. The people who use Napster are your family and friends.”
Kan may have been a pioneer and promoter, but he was clear about the promise — and the threat — of peer technology. “Compact discs, unfortunately, are made of matter. Matter which must be mined, manufactured, and delivered. Each step in that process holds numerous environmental disasters, and in the end the thing consumers are really after is the music carried on the compact disc, not necessarily the compact disc and its associated packaging.”
Then Kan spoke directly to his attackers: “Technology has interesting effects. Those who realize how to integrate and exploit new technologies gain potentially huge advantages over their competitors. Those who do not will acquire an equal disadvantage with respect to their competitors.
“Intellectual property profiteers are now at a crossroads,” Kan continued. “If they adapt quickly, as they have in the past, they can leverage the Internet to revolutionize their industries. If not, they may find grassroots efforts invading their bailiwicks.”
Nearing the end of his talk, Gene Kan spoke of inevitability — the failure of copy protection and the likelihood that end-to-end encryption won’t work. “In end-to-end encryption the data is encrypted right up until it is presented visually, [sonically], or otherwise. It’s an interesting idea that at first appears to put a stop to piracy. But in my mind there are few if any panaceas that are predicated on authoritarian control, and end-to-end encryption is not among them.”
Like a great songwriter, Kan drove his point home with rhythm and repetition. “The end-to-end part of the end-to-end encryption idea is misleading. Since humans don’t have decryption systems built into their anatomy, information must be deciphered before we experience it. And that is the failing. The only way to make music that cannot be copied is to make music that cannot be heard. The only way to make movies that cannot be copied is to make movies that cannot be viewed.”
And he didn’t shrink from a prophetic plea: “The current crop of technologies should be encouraged and adopted, not restricted or abolished, lest lawmakers and industry leaders wish to bring forth truly intransigent technologies.”
Some people say the music of the ’60s was informed and driven by the juxtaposition of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. In the basement at Big Pink, Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel were free to collaborate peer-to-peer with pen, paper, and piano. Today, we’re learning to collaborate bit-by-bit over the Net, but we’re fighting a war for our digital rights — our freedom of expression. Gene Kan knew that, and he fought for it.
“Come to me now, you know/We’re so alone/And life is brief.”
