“Crime Scene:Installation for 2 Computers” by Morgens Jacobsen examines the laws and cultural insecurities around the trading of copyrighted material on the Internet. From his description… “The digital software products of our time raise fundamental questions of intellectual property and copyright. These questions are raised and discussed in courthouses around the world and by free software movements but they are also an issue for much contemporary artistic production. Mogens Jacobsen’s Crime Scene is fine example of the latter. Crime Scene consists of a small peer-to-peer network of only 2 computers. Each computer hosts a selection of copyrighted material (commercial software, music and videos) on its disc drive.The computers run a program which execute the following series of operations:

Computer A offers its valuable files to computer B. Computer B selects a file from the selection and copies it to its own disc. Computer B offers its files to computer 1… Thus the swapping of files continues ad infinitum. The monitors show the negotiation between the computers and the progress of the copying. Filenames of the copied files are also shown.”

Really nice way of materializing the debate around online data and its ownership.