Although it had just finished raining, the air was hot and close. Nobody else was in sight; the only sound other than those from insects and gulls was the staticky low crashing of Caribbean waves. Around me on the sparsely covered red soil was a scatter of rectangles laid out by lines of stones: the outlines of now-vanished buildings, revealed by archaeologists. Cement pathways, steaming faintly from the rain, ran between them. One of the buildings had more imposing walls than the others. The researchers had covered it with a new roof, the only structure they had chosen to protect from the rain. Standing like a sentry by its entrance was a hand-lettered sign: Casa Almirante, Admiral’s House. It marked the first American residence of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the man whom generations of schoolchildren have learned to call the discoverer of the New World.
La Isabela, as this community was called, is situated on the north side of the great Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in what is now the Dominican Republic. It was the initial attempt by Europeans to make a permanent base in the Americas. (To be precise, La Isabela marked the beginning of consequential European settlement — Vikings had established a short-lived village in Newfoundland five centuries before.) The admiral laid out his new domain at the confluence of two small, fast-rushing rivers: a fortified center on the north bank, a satellite community of farms on the south bank. For his home, Columbus — Cristóbal Colón, to give him the name he answered to at the time — chose the best location in town: a rocky promontory in the northern settlement, right at the water’s edge. His house was situated perfectly to catch the afternoon light.
Today La Isabela is almost forgotten. Sometimes a similar fate appears to threaten its founder. Colón is by no means absent from history textbooks, of course, but in them he seems ever less admirable and important. He was a cruel, deluded man, today’s critics say, who stumbled upon the Caribbean by luck. An agent of imperialism, he was in every way a calamity for the Americas’ first inhabitants. Yet a different but equally contemporary perspective suggests that we should continue to take notice of the admiral. Of all the members of humankind who have ever walked the earth, he alone inaugurated a new era in the history of life.
The king and queen of Spain, Fernando (Ferdinand) II and Isabel I, backed Colón’s first voyage grudgingly. Transoceanic travel in those days was heart-stoppingly expensive and risky — the equivalent, perhaps, of spaceshuttle flights today. Despite relentless pestering, Colón was able to talk the monarchs into supporting his scheme only by threatening to take the project to France. He was riding to the frontier, a friend wrote later, when the queen “sent a court bailiff posthaste” to fetch him back. The story is probably exaggerated. Still, it is clear that the sovereigns’ reservations drove the admiral to whittle down his expedition, if not his ambitions, to a minimum: three small ships (the biggest may have been less than sixty feet long), a combined crew of about ninety. Colón himself had to contribute a quarter of the budget, according to a collaborator, probably by borrowing it from Italian merchants.
Everything changed with his triumphant return in March of 1493, bearing golden ornaments, brilliantly colored parrots, and as many as ten captive Indians. The king and queen, now enthusiastic, dispatched Colón just six months later on a second, vastly larger expedition: seventeen ships, a combined crew of perhaps fifteen hundred, among them a dozen or more priests charged with bringing the faith to these new lands. Because the admiral believed he had found a route to Asia, he was sure that China and Japan — and all their opulent goods — were only a short journey beyond. The goal of this second expedition was to create a permanent bastion for Spain in the heart of Asia, a headquarters for further exploration and trade.
The new colony, predicted one of its founders, “will be widely renowned for its many inhabitants, its elaborate buildings, and its magnificent walls.” Instead La Isabela was a catastrophe, abandoned barely five years after its creation. Over time its structures vanished, their very stones stripped to build other, more successful towns. When a U.S.-Venezuelan archaeological team began excavating the site in the late 1980s, the inhabitants of La Isabela were so few that the scientists were able to move the entire settlement to a nearby hillside. Today it has a couple of roadside fish restaurants, a single, failing hotel, and a little-visited museum. On the edge of town, a church, built in 1994 but already showing signs of age, commemorates the first Catholic Mass celebrated in the Americas. Watching the waves from the admiral’s ruined home, I could easily imagine disappointed tourists thinking that the colony had left nothing meaningful behind — that there was no reason, aside from the pretty beach, for anyone to pay attention to La Isabela. But that would be a mistake.
Babies born on the day the admiral founded La Isabela — January 2, 1494 – came into a world in which direct trade and communication between western Europe and East Asia were largely blocked by the Islamic nations between (and their partners in Venice and Genoa), sub- Saharan Africa had little contact with Europe and next to none with South and East Asia, and the Eastern and Western hemispheres were almost entirely ignorant of each other’s very existence. By the time those babies had grandchildren, slaves from Africa mined silver in the Americas for sale to China; Spanish merchants waited impatiently for the latest shipments of Asian silk and porcelain from Mexico; and Dutch sailors traded cowry shells from the Maldive Islands, in the Indian Ocean, for human beings in Angola, on the coast of the Atlantic. Tobacco from the Caribbean ensorcelled the wealthy and powerful in Madrid, Madras, Mecca, and Manila. Group smoke-ins by violent young men in Edo (Tokyo) would soon lead to the formation of two rival gangs, the Bramble Club and the Leather-breeches Club. The shogun jailed seventy of their members, then banned smoking.
Long-distance trade had occurred for more than a thousand years, much of it across the Indian Ocean. China had for centuries sent silk to the Mediterranean by the Silk Road, a route that was lengthy, dangerous, and, for those who survived, hugely profitable. But nothing like this worldwide exchange had existed before, still less sprung up so quickly, or functioned so continuously. No previous trade networks included both of the globe’s two hemispheres; nor had they operated on a scale large enough to disrupt societies on opposite sides of the planet. By founding La Isabela, Colón initiated permanent European occupation in the Americas. And in so doing he began the era of globalization — the single, turbulent exchange of goods and services that today engulfs the entire habitable world.
Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two divided halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Before Colón a few venturesome land creatures had crossed the oceans and established themselves on the other side. Most were insects and birds, as one would expect, but the list also includes, surprisingly, a few farm species — bottle gourds, coconuts, sweet potatoes — the subject today of scholarly head-scratching. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Colón’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea. After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.
Unsurprisingly, this vast biological upheaval had repercussions on human kind. Crosby argued that the Columbian Exchange underlies much of the history we learn in the classroom — it was like an invisible wave, sweeping along kings and queens, peasants and priests, all unknowing. The claim was controversial; indeed, Crosby’s manuscript, rejected by every major academic publisher, ended up being published by such a tiny press that he once joked to me that his book had been distributed “by tossing it on the street, and hoping readers happened on it.” But over the decades since he coined the term, a growing number of researchers have come to believe that the ecological paroxysm set off by Colón’s voyages — as much as the economic convulsion he began — was one of the establishing events of the modern world.
On Christmas Day, 1492, Colón’s first voyage came to an abrupt end when his flagship, the Santa María, ran aground off the northern coast of Hispaniola. Because his two remaining vessels, the Niña and Pinta, were too small to hold the entire crew, he was forced to leave thirty-eight men behind. Colón departed for Spain while those men were building an encampment — a scatter of makeshift huts surrounded by a crude palisade, adjacent to a larger native village. The encampment was called La Navidad (Christmas), after the day of its involuntary creation (its precise location is not known today). Hispaniola’s native people have come to be known as the Taino. The conjoined Spanish-Taino settlement of La Navidad was the intended destination of Colón’s second voyage. He arrived there in triumph, the head of a flotilla, his crewmen swarming the shrouds in their eagerness to see the new land, on November 28, 1493, eleven months after he had left his men behind.
He found only ruin; both settlements, Spanish and Taino, had been razed. “We saw everything burned and the clothing of Christians lying on the weeds,” the ship’s doctor wrote. Nearby Taino showed the visitors the bodies of eleven Spaniards, “covered by the vegetation that had grown over them.” The Indians said that the sailors had angered their neighbors by raping some women and murdering some men. In the midst of the conflict a second Taino group had swooped down and overwhelmed both sides. After nine days of fruitless search for survivors Colón left to find a more promising spot for his base. Struggling against contrary winds, the fleet took almost a month to crawl a hundred miles east along the coast. On January 2, 1494, Colón arrived at the shallow bay where he would found La Isabela.
Almost immediately the colonists ran short of food and, worse, water. In a sign of his inadequacy as an administrator, the admiral had failed to inspect the water casks he had ordered; they, predictably, leaked. Ignoring all complaints of hunger and thirst, the admiral decreed that his men would clear and plant vegetable patches, erect a two-story fortress, and enclose the main, northern half of the new enclave within high stone walls. Inside the walls the Spaniards built perhaps two hundred houses, “small like the huts we use for bird hunting and roofed with weeds,” one man complained.
Most of the new arrivals viewed these labors as a waste of time. Few actually wanted to set up shop in La Isabela, still less till its soil. Instead they regarded the colony as a temporary base camp for the quest for riches, especially gold. Colón himself was ambivalent. On the one hand, he was supposed to be governing a colony that was establishing a commercial entrepôt in the Americas. On the other hand, he was supposed to be at sea, continuing his search for China. The two roles conflicted, and Colón was never able to resolve the conflict.
On April 24 Colón sailed off to find China. Before leaving, he ordered his military commander, Pedro Margarit, to lead four hundred men into the rugged interior to seek Indian gold mines. After finding only trivial quantities of gold — and not much food — in the mountains, Margarit’s charges, tattered and starving, came back to La Isabela, only to discover that the colony, too, had little to eat — those left behind, resentful, had refused to tend gardens. The irate Margarit hijacked three ships and fled to Spain, promising to brand the entire enterprise as a waste of time and money. Left behind with no food, the remaining colonists took to raiding Taino storehouses. Infuriated, the Indians struck back, setting off a chaotic war. This was the situation that confronted Colón when he returned to La Isabela five months after his departure, dreadfully sick and having failed to reach China.
A loose alliance of four Taino groups faced off against the Spaniards and one Taino group that had thrown its lot in with the foreigners. The Taino, who had no metal, could not withstand assaults with steel weapons. But they made the fight costly for the Spaniards. In an early form of chemical warfare, the Indians threw gourds stuffed with ashes and ground hot peppers at their attackers, unleashing clouds of choking, blinding smoke. Protective bandannas over their faces, they charged through the tear gas, killing Spaniards. The intent was to push out the foreigners — an unthinkable course to Colón, who had staked everything on the voyage. When the Spaniards counterattacked, the Taino retreated scorched-earth style, destroying their own homes and gardens in the belief, Colón wrote scornfully, “that hunger would drive us from the land.” Neither side could win. The Taino alliance could not eject the Spaniards from Hispaniola. But the Spaniards were waging war on the people who provided their food supply; total victory would be a total disaster. They won skirmish after skirmish, killing countless natives. Meanwhile, starvation, sickness, and exhaustion filled the cemetery in La Isabela.
Humiliated by the calamity, the admiral set off for Spain on March 10, 1496, to beg the king and queen for more money and supplies. When he returned two years later — the third of what would become four voyages across the Atlantic — so little was left of La Isabela that he landed on the opposite side of the island, in Santo Domingo, a new settlement founded by his brother Bartolomé, whom he had left behind. Colón never again set foot in his first colony and it was almost forgotten.
Despite the brevity of its existence, La Isabela marked the beginning of an enormous change: the creation of the modern Caribbean landscape. Colón and his crew did not voyage alone. They were accompanied by a menagerie of insects, plants, mammals, and microorganisms. Beginning with La Isabela, European expeditions brought cattle, sheep, and horses, along with crops like sugarcane (originally from New Guinea), wheat (from the Middle East), bananas (from Africa), and coffee (also from Africa). Equally important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitchhiked along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description — all of them poured from the hulls of Colón’s vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.
Charles C. Mann, a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, as well as for the TV network HBO and the series “Law & Order.” His “1491″ won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year.
Excerpted from “1493″ by Charles C. Mann. Copyright © 2011 by Charles C. Mann. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Just when Napster seemed finally on the ropes, the File-Sharing Service That Refused to Die may have come back to life.
Napster interim CEO Hank Barry announced Wednesday night that the company would become an affiliate of MusicNet, the forthcoming subscription service that combines the catalogs of three of the five major labels: Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI. Later this summer, Barry said, MusicNet, which uses technology from RealNetworks, will be combined with a new, pay version of Napster’s original file-sharing service as part of an ambitious two-tiered system.
In a joint telephone press conference with Barry, RealNetworks CEO and MusicNet interim CEO Rob Glaser repeatedly stressed that the agreement was but “one of many steps” toward creating the celestial jukebox — the long-envisioned, fully interactive music subscription service that makes all of the world’s recorded music available at the click of a mouse. And indeed the new Napster still faces many obstacles.
Just hours before Napster’s announcement that it was licensing Warner and EMI music, both labels issued statements insisting that they would not allow the company’s tens of millions of users to listen to a single one of their songs until they were satisfied that their copyrights would be protected. And according to a Napster representative, even Bertelsmann, which has partnered with Napster since October, is not yet ready to drop out of the bitter, multibillion-dollar lawsuit the major labels filed against the service in 1999, which led a court to order extensive filtering on the site, vastly reducing what music can be found there.
Perhaps more importantly, the announcement said nothing about whether Napster would be able to come to terms with the other key player in the digital-music wars — the 800 members of the National Music Publishers Association, who are in legal conflict on many fronts with both Napster and the major labels, and therefore MusicNet. (Each musical composition is covered by two copyrights, one associated with the performance, which is usually controlled by the record label, and one associated with the underlying composition, which is controlled by the songwriter and publisher.) Without understanding how much publishers will charge, MusicNet cannot know whether, as Glaser optimistically predicted, monthly subscription prices will really be “about the cost of a new CD every month.” Indeed, without publishers’ approval, no interactive Net-music service — Napster, MusicNet, or Duet, the Sony-Universal alliance that is MusicNet’s main competitor — may be possible at all.
Finally, launching the new Napster will require surmounting enormous technical challenges. Napster will have to integrate its service — which is based on widely separated computers exchanging MP3 files — with MusicNet, which is based on streaming or downloading music in Real’s own formats from a few central locations. Indeed, there are serious doubts as to whether MusicNet will be up to its part of the job. No company, even streaming leader RealNetworks, has ever streamed tens or hundreds of thousands of songs simultaneously to users over long periods of time. (The same questions apply to Duet, which will apparently be powered by technology from MP3.com, the San Diego-based start-up that Universal acquired last month, reportedly for more than $300 million.) According to company representatives, no one outside Real — nobody at Napster or even America Online, which is also going to license MusicNet for its 29 million subscribers — has seen MusicNet in action, even though Real is supposed to have the technology ready by mid-June.
The new Napster, which is supposed to launch later this summer, will at first be an ungainly hybrid of the old service and MusicNet. According to Barry, the service will have two levels of usage: a basic one, in which subscribers will have access to “the world of independent music,” and a more expensive one, which will let subscribers have access to the content on MusicNet. To find music, company representatives say, subscribers will first search the low-level, file-trading service and then, in a separate action, the high-level, MusicNet service.
In theory, the two services will be fully integrated, with users able to search both at once, in a second phase that will be rolled out at the end of the year. Until then, Napster subscribers who want to play music from both sources in a single session will have to run two pieces of music software: for content from MusicNet, a version of RealPlayer; for Napster file-sharing content, Napster’s own player or a player from any other company with the requisite plug-in. (The ownership of MusicNet, according to a Real Web page, is now “approximately 40 percent Real, 20 percent AOL Time Warner, 20 percent BMG and 20 percent EMI.”)
Not only that, the two levels will have different methods of security: Napster’s own technology, based on inserting specially developed software “keys” into ordinary MP3 files, and MusicNet’s RealSystem iQ, which encrypts streams and downloads in several formats with software from SecureMedia, a San Francisco start-up. And the new Napster will also have two different methods of paying for rights — its own proprietary system, which will directly compensate independent labels and artists, and through MusicNet. The daunting complexity of integrating two such different systems — analogous to, but harder than, say, running Windows and Mac OS on the same computer — may be why Barry twice referred to developing the new Napster as a “long-term process.”
These difficulties aside, the announcement nonetheless came as a shot in the arm for the legally hounded Napster. On Wednesday, Net-music consulting firm Webnoize reported that in the wake of a court ruling ordering Napster to filter out major-label content, the number of songs traded on the service had fallen from 2.79 billion in February to 360 million in May — a decline of 87 percent. Equally telling, the average number of files shared per user dropped over that same period from 220 to 21, as Napster’s filters kicked in. And competition from truly decentralized, Gnutella-like systems — BearShare and LimeWire are the two most prominent — though still small, is increasing rapidly. According to LimeWire, the number of computers on Gnutella-like systems increased tenfold between February and May, from a daily peak of 5,000 to a daily peak of 50,000.
Yet, in an illustration of the arithmetical fact that a small percentage of a big number can still be a big number, Napster still has an enviable 6 million unique visitors every day, according to the company. And it is just barely possible that it may outstrip MusicNet and Duet by obtaining an agreement from the publishers before the major labels.
As has been widely reported, Napster is pursuing intense negotiations with the publishers, who may see a deal with the file-sharing service as a way to prove to the court of public opinion that they are not being obstructionists, as the labels have loudly charged. According to the terms of its deal with MusicNet, Napster cannot launch its version of MusicNet ahead of AOL and Real, the other two licensees. But this provision has an expiration date, and if by then Napster is the only party with a publishing deal, it could emerge as the sole candidate for the celestial jukebox — a circumstance sure to enrage the major labels.
If all goes as planned, Charley Pride will make music history in April. After selling more than 70 million records, Pride — one of the last great figures from the pre-Garth, twang-box radio glory days of country music — is set to release America’s first copy-protected compact disc. A tribute to singer Jim Reeves, who died in a plane crash in 1964, Pride’s CD will incorporate technology that, in theory, will stop listeners from ripping its tracks into MP3s. If it works — a hotly disputed question — copy protection will change the terms of the battle over online music.
Although at first glance there would seem to be little overlap between Pride’s audience and the “information wants to be free” demographic, the singer was disturbed to find his songs on Napster. “As I was negotiating with Charley, I learned that [protecting CDs] was important to him,” says Bob Heatherly, head of Music City Records, the independent Nashville label that Pride joined in January. “He was especially concerned about the songwriters,” says Heatherly, because, unlike singers who can tour, songwriters depend almost entirely on CD royalties. “I’ve seen songwriters myself who have been close to homeless before they finally got the two or three hits that let them survive. And so when I realized how important this was to Charley, I said, ‘Let’s find a way to make this happen.’” Read Inside’s interview with Charley Pride.
Music City plans to employ patent-pending CD-protection software from SunComm, a Phoenix start-up. The software passed initial tests in late March and Heatherly believes that a copy-proof “Charley Pride: A Tribute to Jim Reeves” should appear on store shelves by early May.
Pride almost certainly won’t be the last musician to use the technology. For years the digerati have mocked the labels for putting out what are, in effect, perfect rip-ready copies of digital master recordings. “The CD is the root of all of our problems with the Net,” says Jay Samit, senior vice president of new media at EMI, which is testing various copy-protection technologies. “If CDs were as hard to copy as DVDs or VHS tapes or even books, we would not be going through anything like what we’re going through now with Napster or Gnutella.”
Prodded by the explosive growth of Napster, and the difficulties of blocking copyrighted material on any file-sharing service, the labels have been actively examining methods of copy-protecting CDs. Indeed, Inside has learned that at least four of the five major labels are seriously evaluating the technology — and that at least three have begun or are about to begin testing it. Although label executives stress that their companies have not yet committed to copy-protecting their releases, they are unanimous in their belief that someone will try out the technology commercially within months.
Unfortunately, every CD-protection scheme faces a crucial obstacle: making CDs unrippable onto CD-ROMs also makes them unplayable on some CD players — a feature guaranteed to anger customers. The risks were demonstrated clearly in June, when BMG trial-released in Germany a version of “Razorblade Romance,” the second CD from the Finnish tattoo-metal band HIM, that used copy-protection software from Midbar Technology of Tel Aviv. Despite apparently extensive testing, about 3 percent of buyers could not play it, forcing a chagrined BMG to recall the CDs and reissue the record. The label is continuing to test copy-protection systems.
“Nobody wants to make things difficult for legitimate purchasers,” says Cary Sherman, general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America, which is helping the labels examine the new techniques. “But if piracy continues to spiral out of control, [copy-protecting CDs] will become more and more attractive an option — even if it has some negative impact on some listeners.”
A number of software companies have sprung into existence to help the industry solve its piracy problems, including SunComm, Midbar and TTR Technologies, another Israeli outfit. None will publicly discuss how its products work, but interviews with the labels and audio engineers suggest they all function in essentially the same way: They take advantage of small differences between the technical specifications for compact discs, which follow what is called the “RedBook,” or CD-DA standard, and the specifications for CD-ROMs, which follow the “YellowBook” (for straight CD-ROMs) or “OrangeBook” (for rewritable CD-RWs) standards.
The RedBook standard — named after the red binder it first appeared in — was defined by Phillips and Sony in 1982, back when Shawn Fanning was still crawling around bear rugs. Quickly Sony and Phillips realized that the CD could also be used to house computer files, and in 1984 the two companies developed the somewhat different YellowBook standard for data storage. (Phillips and Sony finalized the OrangeBook standard, for rewritable CDs, in 1995.)
Unlike vinyl records, which store music in a continuous spiral, RedBook CDs — the CDs owned by every music fan — break up music tracks and distribute them higgledy-piggledy around the disk in “sectors” that are similar to the data sectors on computer hard drives. Because the data are scattered all over the disc, each CD has a “table of contents” that tells the player where to find each track. RedBook CDs run a maximum of 74 minutes and can hold at most 99 tracks — if a CD is longer or has more tracks, the player won’t know how to read the extra music. Importantly, the music sectors on a CD are interwoven with additional error-fixing data that the player’s built-in software uses to reconstruct the tracks if dirt or tiny air bubbles from the manufacturing process make little chunks of the disk unreadable.
CD-ROMs, which are also used for computer software, are different. Because CD-ROMs may have hundreds or even thousands of files, they need to handle many more than 99 “tracks,” which means they have different, larger tables of contents and can, in theory, hold up to 100 minutes. Because computer programs can’t just skip a bit of code if the disc is dirty, CD-ROMs are more exacting about error correction. For that reason, a YellowBook CD-ROM devotes an extra chunk of each data sector to a second method of detecting and fixing flaws.
According to label executives and audio engineers, copy-protection firms take advantage of these differences by adding extra data to both the tables of contents and the music tracks — data that are ignored by CD players but confuse CD-ROMs. One purchaser of the Midbar-protected version of Razorblade Romance, for instance, reported on Slashdot that an Onkyo CD player had no trouble with the CD, but Cdparanoia, a powerful open-source ripping program, could extract only 30 seconds of it. The CD player, the Slashdotter wrote, displayed “a playing time of 100 minutes, 30 seconds — not! … So the trick seems to be that the playing time of 100:30 is interpreted as 00:30.” The literal-minded computer software, he suggested, stopped when told it had reached the end, whereas the “hifi-player also says 00:30 of course, but after 30 secs it goes down to 99:59″ and plays normally. Asked about this account, a Midbar representative said the firm “cannot provide more technical information at this time.”
Although audio engineers say that planting false data in the table of contents is part of every copy-protection scheme, they also aver that the most important copy-protection techniques involve adding actual errors to the music. When a standard CD player comes across an error in a CD, says a technology officer at a major label, “it basically skips over it and keeps playing. But a CD-ROM must read every bit of the data. When it detects something that it suspects is an error, it loops back and rereads the data, trying to discover how to fix the problem. And ultimately, if the error can’t be corrected” — as is the case with the “erroneous” data introduced by copy-protection programs — “the software will cease to run and the CD-ROM will stop playing.”
The trouble is, many high-end and car-stereo CD players use CD-ROM technology, which is both more accurate and less likely to skip when the player is jostled. Consequently, some audiophiles and commuters may not be able to play protected CDs. “I feel gloomy every time I go on a plane and see how many people are listening to music with their laptops,” says a label executive who nonetheless regards copy protection as inevitable. “High-end players, car players, laptops — those people are going to feel burned, and justifiably so, if they can’t listen to music in the way they like.”
In addition, according to Don Shulsinger of Oak Technology, a CD-RW and optical-storage manufacturer, the sheer disparity in the technical specs of CD-ROM brands almost ensures that some CD-ROM machines will always be able to read copy-protected CDs. “There is no standard way in which the firmware inside of a CD-ROM drive is written,” he says. “There’s massive amounts of drives out there and the testing copy-protection firms have to do is simply enormous.”
“We’re of course aware of these issues,” says Emanuel Kronitz, chief operating officer of TTR, which says two major labels are testing its software. “It’s a major technological challenge, which is why we believe that what we’ve done — mostly beating it — is not trivial.”
Even if the compatibility issues can be solved, the Slashdot crowd will protest that the very idea of copy protection infringes their fair-use rights. (The industry responds that fair use of music does not include the right to make entire backup CDs, and that consumers will still be able to make cassette copies.) More importantly, Internauts argue that copy protection is futile because it will inevitably be cracked by the Net’s legions of amateur lock-rattlers. In their view, people will get around copy protection simply by running the output of their CD players directly into their computer sound cards and capturing the resulting music with stream-capture programs like Total Recorder. In addition, computer-game hackers have developed programs — such as BlindRead, CloneCD and DiscDump, all readily available on the Net — that duplicate copy-protected game CD-ROMs by ignoring the “errors” that manufacturers introduce into the data in an effort to stump typical CD-ROM copying programs. In theory, people could adapt them to rip protected music tracks.
More methods of beating copy protection will surely evolve, hackers argue, spurred on with the tacit consent of the computer trade. As chagrined label executives have often noted, an entire industry — ranging from start-ups like MusicMatch to giants like Hewlett-Packard and Apple, which are touting their products as ripping machines — has grown up around the CD-ROM and MP3. Will all of these companies just sit on their hands if copy-proofing becomes the norm?
Copy-protection firms mostly regard hacking threats as marginal. “It is always possible that somebody somewhere will break the protection,” concedes William H. Whitmore Jr., SunComm’s vice president of marketing. Acknowledging this, SunComm’s promotional material promises only “to greatly reduce unauthorized digital copying of original content on CDs. “But it will be far too difficult for the average user,” Whitmore says. “For them, the CD-ROM in their computer — the nemesis of the recording industry — just won’t play our CDs.”
But even in the best of circumstances, copy-protecting CDs is “not a long-term solution,” according to Talal Shamoon, vice president of media at the digital-rights management firm InterTrust Technologies, which works extensively with Universal. Copy-protected CDs, he argues, inevitably remove possibilities which listeners now enjoy, such as the ability to rip songs onto CDs.
The industry will have to make a better tradeoff with its customers, he says. As an example, he points to the French techno act Daft Punk’s second album, “Discovery.” Released earlier this month by Virgin Records, the CD came with a plastic card that gave CD purchasers access to a special fan-club Web site. The site offered additional music that is, in theory, available exclusively to people who bought CDs. “The beauty of the Daft Punk model is that there’s no real threat to consumers,” Shamoon says. “Instead it’s aimed at creating an affinity experience around the compact disc.” He believes that putting such value in consumers’ hands lessens their incentive to pirate.
Ultimately, though, affinity experiences alone will not save the industry, in Shamoon’s view. “I’ve talked to a lot of people in the record industry, and they all are of the opinion that in the long run, the CD and the CD player, as they stand now, are basically a lost cause.” At best, he says, protected CDs will be a “bridge technology” as the industry prepares itself for “the only real solution”: replacing CDs with a new kind of music-playing machine, such as the forthcoming, quarter-sized DataPlay disc, which should be available by Christmas.
“You’re going to need a new generation of secure devices,” says Dan Lieman, one of the four mathematicians who co-founded NTRU, a rights-management firm in Burlington, Mass. “Ultimately it’s going to have to be done in hardware, because hardware is a lot harder to hack than software.”
Unfortunately, consumers have resisted past efforts to replace CDs with MiniDiscs, DVD audio discs and Super Audio Compact Discs. For now, the labels’ technologists agree that copy-protecting CDs with software locks is the most practical way to go. “Some of the best and most experienced engineers in the world are working on this,” says Samit of EMI. “It’s near and dear to our hearts to get this right.”
