Obsolete Your Idols

While I slept last night I thought of a gadget. Here’s the quick pitch:  imagine the portable music player you travel with seeking out more music of the kind you like from the people around you, automatically.

First, the disclaimers. Maybe this already exists, I haven’t looked. Maybe you already had this idea and I read about it and forgot I read it. If that’s the case, I apologize.  Because of the way ideas come to me they’re often indistinguishable from memories. This almost certainly couldn’t work in our existing legal framework where creativity and sharing is squashed by big cartels buying legislation and courts fearing innovation as I’m imagining it. That said, here’s some more of my thinking about how it might work.

Second, the mechanics.  The key element of it are the software smarts; it can be bolstered by hardware but I think the kinds of actions the device need to make can’t be solved with hardware alone.  So it could be an application on your Android or other smart phone, on your PDA, your laptop or a dedicated piece of hardware running the application.

Dedicated hardware could  provide Local Area Wireless Network options, such as bluetooth, IR, 802.11s (mesh) and whatever else people can find local peers with.  Otherwise, avahi or another zeroconf on a LAWN connected laptop or even devices wired to a LAN could potentially perform the exploration and exchange.

Each potential participant in the exchange needs to share information about what it seeks and what it has.  It needs to make decisions about whether what it’s being offered meets its seek criteria sufficiently well to attempt a transfer.  It needs to detect and deal with Byzantine faults.  It needs to negotiate a transfer rate with multiple simultaneous partners which won’t saturate itself or its peers.

Here’s what I was imagining an exchange playing out like

• A: Hi, is someone there?
• B: Hello, A.  I know protocols purple, green and blue.
• C: Hello, A.  I know protocols purple, blue and yellow.
• M: Hello, A.  I know protocols red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple and many more!
• A: B,  let’s switch to protocol green. C.  let’s switch to protocol blue. M, let’s switch to protocol red.
• B:  Pleased to meet you, A. Do you have any Creative Commons licensed music?
• C: Pleased to meet you, A.
• M: Pleased to meet you, A.  Do you have any Windows executables with the DRM removed?
• A: B, yes, I do.  Do you have any public domain ebooks?  Let’s work out an exchange.
• A: C, do you have this specific list of public domain ebooks I lack? [List is the subset from B which A is interested in, thus allowing it to use something like bit torrent to transfer parts from each of them both to distribute demand and allow comparison of pieces to verify the content is accurate.]
• A: M, no I don’t and your question makes me nervous. [A then puts M on a ignore-with-timeout list.]

Some of the things I’m trying to show there is that your device may want to use different protocols with different peers, to avoid collision or because some devices are more capable in some modes; that a device is expected to interact in various ways, by making requests, responding to requests, prioritizing tasks.  There’s some thinking about detecting suspicious peers and treating these LAWN gnomes as a tiny cloud where nodes would become eventually consistent, so that B and C and M have all been neighbors long enough that B and C have nothing to say to each other when A arrives, they’ve already reached an equilibrium and have exchanged all the files they care to (until A starts to provide B with new music at which point B might tell C ‘let us resume our earlier negotiations, I have something new to trade’) and neither B nor C is talking to M, having long since moved this obvious commercial software troll on an ignore-no-timeout list.  Oh, and it’s not just music being exchanged, though that’s the sexiest use case.  If your ebook reader built up your library based on books you already had, probably no one would hate that.

Third, a stab at addressing some concerns I raised to myself and then answered. In terms of evaluating if a given music offer matches seek criteria, I’m pretty sure data from last.fm could be very handy. It would perhaps be possible to build a similar dataset and heuristics around ebooks or other mobile data usage.  You’d tend to be a lot more successful in finding acceptable offers in places where you tend to be around people you share tastes with.  Like going to a show by a band makes it more likely you’d find acceptable the music on offer from the devices of the people around you over the offerings you’d find standing in line at a grocery store. It seems impossible to me to avoid copyright infringement even if you hardcode into the device only accepting content which is appropriately licensed because it could doubtlessly be jailbroken or its peers could conspire, but maybe raising the bar on doing so would mitigate some of the risk of inadvertant exposure (since it’s not a protection from being sued into poverty, the risk never goes away entirely).