ABSTRACT
As companies over the last decade have built their businesses around user-generated content, it has similarly become paramount to rethink the distinction and dynamics between idealism and commercialism. To better understand the dynamics of the Internet, this chapter investigates the movements and fluxes between idealism and commercialism when it comes to the development of standards such as MP3 and DivX. DivX and MP3 are technological standards, meaning that they are a special type of technological artifact. The chapter provides an account of the development of MP3 as a standard and a phenomenon, focusing on the central episodes of displacement and translation. It traces the various displacements and translations of the video standard DivX and describes the prominence of the interplay between commercial and idealistic forces. DivX had become a popular way to prepare video files for online sharing within piracy cultures.
