[WEB4LIB] Napster Question (Was Audio Books Being Shared)

[Allan R Barclay]

At 2:44 PM -0700 6/23/00, Donald A. Barclay wrote:
>One question I haven't heard raised about Napster, Gnutella, et al. is that
>of the authenticity of the files you download. For example, what's to keep
>some person, group, or company from flooding the Napwaves with files that
>appear to be tracks from Ms Spears yet-to-be-released album but turn out to
>be advertisements, political rants, or the songs of some Spears-wannabe in
>search of an audience?

Not to mention the potential for mischief with viruses - I don't know 
Napster well but I'm guessing its security is not anywhere near 
bulletproof.

>Maybe with music, such trickery wouldn't be a problem. After a few seconds
>of listening, you would figure out the file you've downloaded is not really
>the song you wanted and would simply turn it off. However, imagine if
>journal articles come to be shared the way music is now shared on Napster.
>And imagine  somebody tampers with a journal article they are sharing by,
>perhaps, changing a few numbers here and there or  rewriting the
>conclusion, . It would be difficult to detect subtle tampering, and the
>consequences could be quite serious in such fields as medicine,
>engineering, chemistry, and so on.

:-)  We had a situation with an artist I'm fond of who records very 
infrequently. A tape was released which was, reportedly, tracks from 
the new release. It turned out they actually were (someone had stolen 
them from the studio), but I can imagine how that would have played 
out had Napster been around back then. Since it was unreleased 
material nobody would know how to verify it - we'd know it was Dave 
singing, but that would be about it...

>I'm not trying to come off as pro- or anti-Napster, but I do see the
>question of authenticity as a serious challenge to the notion that Napster
>et al. is going to transform publishing into an entirely communal activity.
>Perhaps one role of librarians will be to ensure the authenticity of
>information?

Yes, I think authenticity will become a huge issue in the very near 
future. While I think there will be technological ways to verify 
authenticity (certificates, "watermarks" and such) the question is 
"who will do it?". I really like the idea of communal publishing, and 
think that in some ways publishers are actually dinosaurs getting in 
the way of more efficient distribution of information, but I agree 
that for professional publications a certain level of authenticity is 
going to be needed or people won't buy into that system of 
distribution (I sure wouldn't). Maybe libraries will function 
something like notary publics for digital information?

An interesting aside: at the Dublin Core conference last fall the 
issue of the veracity of metadata itself came up, and by extension 
the quality of cataloging. I could see that in the future you might 
be able to choose from several different sources of metadata or 
cataloging information (who do you think does a better job of this - 
yourself? your institution's library? a government library?). 
Depending on your views you might not think the sources librarians 
traditionally view as trustworthy (themselves, Library of Congress, 
National Library of Medicine) "do it right" and choose an alternate 
set of metadata about the same thing being described. And much like 
the current webjacking with domain names, a far more subtle form of 
subversion would be to hijack the metadata itself! The idea ended in 
discussion of the need for sources of "trusted cataloging" (including 
some kind of authentication scheme) if we want to share metadata. 
With all the effort put into information sharing it hadn't really 
occurred to me that people might actually need to protect against 
interlopers or that people might not even want the wonderful metadata 
librarians create...

Allan "the other Barclay"
who is now having nightmares about hackers and OPACs...
-- 
________________________________________________________________________
Allan R Barclay                               Email: abarclay at iupui.edu
Online Education Coordinator                  Voice: (317) 274-2254
Indiana University School of Medicine         Fax: (317) 274-4056
Ruth Lilly Medical Library        http://www.medlib.iupui.edu/hw/neuro/
975 W. Walnut St.  IB 100         http://www.medlib.iupui.edu/students/
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