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MUTINY ON THE NET | PAGE 3 OF 3
Despite the multifarious MP3 challenges, RIAA's D'Onofrio is confident that the music industry will prevail: "We are going to try and do everything we can with the resources we have to curtail piracy. We certainly have the resources at this point to deal with piracy as it exists now." "People tell us, 'You'll never be able to shut down all the sites,'" Geffen Records "entertainment technologist" Jim Griffin said in an interview posted to one major MP3 information site. "But we're committed to doing it and we can do it. We'll put four full-time people on the job if we have to. And it doesn't take four people now, that's for sure. The lists of sites make our job easy. They do the work for us." (Griffin says the statements on the MP3 site are an inaccurate record of a conversation he had with MP3.com's Michael Robertson, and that he never granted a formal interview.) D'Onofrio notes that the RIAA uses its own Web-crawler bot to cruise the Net searching for MP3 files. Indeed, on the Net, the same tools that MP3 seekers use to find the song they are lusting after are available to the record-industry police. The better the search engine helps the pirates, the more deadly it is in their enemies' hands. D'Onofrio also says that the recording industry is developing its own technological countermeasures -- such as incorporating digital signatures, encryption or some other form of copy protection in new music releases. Some pirates will always be able to crack such protection, D'Onofrio concedes -- but at the very least, more sophisticated technological defenses "raise the stakes in terms of the number of people who can [engage in piracy]." The problem for the music industry is that the horse is already out of the barn: All the music that has ever been released already on compact disc is up for grabs, unprotected and easily transferable to the Net. "They are in a pickle," says Michael Robertson, the Webmaster at MP3.com. "People are going to have access to these songs if they want them -- that's why [the recording industry] needs to embrace a more open approach." Many MP3 fans say that they're becoming pirates because they're frustrated with high prices and lack of options. "People want choices, and today there are no choices but to spend $16 on a CD to get the one single that you like," says Robertson. "In the absence of legitimate alternatives, people will make their own alternative. Today that means that what they do is largely illegal. It doesn't have to be -- if the recording industry would sell singles or MP3s, that would go a long way towards preventing the piracy." "CDs are WAY overpriced," wrote one member of the Calypso Production Society on a Web-based bulletin board. "So how else am I to get half decent music? Why, get on the Internet and leech babee! So here I am, and here I will stay and if you or any other organization wishes to complain about me spending no bucks on CDs and plenty of bandwidth on MP3s, then you'd better get the music stores around here to drop their prices by at least 25 percent." That CPS member (who declined to be named because, as she says, "I don't need the RIAA on my ass") says MP3s are valuable as a kind of try-before-you-buy taste -- especially for lesser known artists who don't receive much exposure from record companies. Geffen's Griffin, in his MP3.com interview, argued that MP3 traders have no right to decide who deserves MP3-facilitated publicity. "We need to bring order to the Net," said Griffin. "People need to stop deciding for artists how the artist should distribute their music. That's really what we're talking about here, that artists should be the ones to determine how their music is distributed." Similarly, D'Onofrio, an 18-year veteran of the anti-piracy business, dismisses the overpricing complaint. "That is an argument that has always been made by people who bootleg -- by any pirate who is putting out a counterfeit cassette," says D'Onofrio. "But there is no overhead for the person who is doing the unauthorized counterfeiting. They don't have marketing expenses, they don't have distribution expenses." If pressed, many MP3 pirates will admit that they don't have too many legs to stand on. The dramas of piracy and botwars and data-ripping may be arcane. But buried beneath them are signs that the pieces are falling into place for a Net-based challenge to the entertainment industry's established order. For years, Internet dreamers have hoped that the Net's innate characteristics would offer a way past the marketing and distribution bottlenecks that have long blocked mid-range artists from making a living. As far back as 1994, the founders of the Internet Undergound Music Archive (IUMA) were hyping the potential emergence of the "middle-class musician" to everyone who would listen. The distributive powers of the Net, they argued, would allow recording artists to cut out expensive middlemen and realize the bulk of the profits from sales of their CDs. Till now, this dream has been hampered by the primitive state of Net technology. Downloading CD-quality music takes too long. Bandwidth has historically been in too short supply, and computer microprocessing power simply too weak to crunch all that data. Even now, a half-hour wait to download a four-minute single may seem interminable. But it's finally fast enough for significant numbers of music fans to use -- and it will only get faster over time. "We're making real progress," says Kevin Ratner, vice president of business operations for IUMA. "The explosion of bandwidth is really helping, and already they are working on MPEG Layer-4" -- which will improve compression and sound quality even further. The irony is that even as the MP3 frenzy demonstrates that the Net is ready to take on music distribution duties, it also illustrates how hard it's going to be to get people to pay up in this new world. MP3 piracy tantalizes us with promises of the medium's potential, but at the same time it undermines the likelihood of that promise ever being realized. So what is to be done? The entertainment industry is seeking to cripple all digital copying technology and criminalize every copying act -- its lobbyists are engaged in a wholesale attack on such concepts as fair use and the practice of copying for personal use. And Congress has been responsive. In 1992, Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act -- forbidding the import, manufacture or distribution of all digital recording "devices" capable of making multiple identical copies. These days, every home computer is potentially such a device. Last December, President Clinton signed into law the No Electronic Theft Act, which further tightened the laws against electronic reproduction of copyrighted material. With all the mighty resources at its disposal, the entertainment industry intends to pursue a policy of zero tolerance. One leading theorist of copyright law thinks that such a policy is misguided -- and ultimately impossible to enforce. "There will always be copyright leakage," says UC-Berkeley law professor Pamela Samuelson. "I think that cultivating good citizenship is probably a better idea than trying to mandate that every piece of technology can't play something for which there is no authorization. In some sense you have to think through your long-term strategy. The kind of Draconian measures it would take to stop leakage would make us into a copyright police state which we wouldn't want to live in." But how can good citizenship be cultivated? The MP3 rebels suggest that lowering prices, or at least making new singles available for purchase via the Net, would be a good start. Michael Robertson dreams of the day when he can hear a song on the radio, punch a button and pay for an immediate download. But that won't happen with the flick of a switch. Last fall, when Capitol Records announced that it would sell the new Duran Duran single via the Web, the move sparked a rebellion from retail outlets fearful of new competition. As Samuelson notes, "There are lots of different industry segments, and their special interests all need to be balanced." Only one thing is for sure: "Will the Net change how the entertainment business works?" is no longer a hypothetical question. My new Rage Against the Machine track is proof enough of that. Oh, and by the way -- I'd never heard a Rage Against the Machine song before I downloaded that single. It rocked. I think I'm going to buy the CD.
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