Napster the Revolution
A Crisis of Conduct
It's not just pop music. Every industry that trades in
intellectual property--from publishing to needlework
patterns--could get Napsterized
By ADAM COHEN
Jim Hedgepath, president of Pegasus Originals, was vacationing
in the Rockies last summer when he got a tip-off via e-mail.
Internet users were flocking to a new website and furiously
downloading his artists' copyrighted work for free. The site
shut off the downloads when Hedgepath threatened to sue. But
within days the same bootlegs were circulating on an
underground, members-only site. All this easy Internet piracy
made Hedgepath despair for the future of his craft. "Many
artists have gone, and many more will go," he sighs. "I've
talked to a lot who are looking for something else to do."
Something, that is, other than designing cross-stitch needlework
patterns.
Hedgepath's company doesn't deal in music, as so many injured
copyright holders do these days. It sells ornate stitching
patterns, and the files that are being traded Napster-style are
templates for hobbyists looking to make pillows decorated with
cuddly dogs and flowery pastoral scenes.
Duplicating patterns may not seem like a terrible crime. Your mom
may even have copied one or two in her time rather than pay a few
dollars each to buy them from companies like Pegasus. But pattern
pirates are on the loose on the Internet, and the middle-age
crafts crowd has begun to demonstrate the same deeply held sense
of entitlement felt by 17-year-old Limp Bizkit fans downloading
free MP3 tunes. When Hedgepath challenged the piracy of one
outfit, brazenly named PatternPiggies, the online postings in
response were downright defiant. Shouted one user: "Ladies, this
is war, and I'm out for blood."
Make no mistake: the implications of the peer-to-peer
file-sharing movement that Napster pioneered go way beyond pop
music. There are already Napster-like services for videos and
full-length feature films. Books, blueprints, vintage comics and
stock photos may be next in line. Even newspapers and magazines
are worried. (Hey, you did pay for this article, didn't you?) The
fact is--as the stitching-pattern makers learned the hard
way--there's no corner of the so-called content industry, no bit
of intellectual property, no idea, that isn't in danger of being
Napsterized. "The hype is justified," insists Jupiter
Communications analyst Aram Sinnreich. "Network file sharing has
profound implications for the business model of the entire
entertainment industry."
Epic battles loom in a war that will stretch from courtrooms to
boardrooms and back. On a practical level, the conflict is being
fought, as Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig has observed,
between two sets of "codes." There's the legal code, or set of
laws, that could end up endorsing file sharing or driving it into
the criminal underworld, and there's the software writer's code,
or computer instructions, that can create programs for sharing
copyrighted information or encrypt files so they can never be
shared.
And the gladiators themselves? They tend to adhere to one of two
rival information-age ideologies: the info-anarchists' rallying
cry that "information wants to be free" or the entertainment
industry's insistence that content creators must get paid or
there will be no new art to download.
Yet to think of Napster as just a way to steal intellectual
property is to miss the impact it has already had on a music
industry that many feel was ripe for revolutionary change.
Napster makes music available a la carte, one tune at a time--a
welcome relief to fans tired of having to pay album prices to get
their hands on one or two good songs. It also unlocks--and makes
available for download--the greatest music library in the history
of the world, much of it all but forgotten by the major labels. A
few clicks of that mouse, and in streams bootleg Led Zeppelin or
Ani DiFranco's instrumental version of the old communist anthem
Internationale or--Joe Lieberman, take note--Hebrew prayer chants
from the world's leading cantors.
There is no underestimating the threat that all this free file
sharing poses to existing business models. There are as many as
1 billion music files available on Napster users' computers--a
good chunk of the music backlist that record labels own and have
traditionally profited handsomely from. Forrester Research last
week unveiled a study predicting that within five years the
music industry will lose $ 3.1 billion to piracy and the
newfound independence of musicians. The music labels tried for a
while to convince themselves that online piracy was a young
person's sport, something that would be outgrown, like binge
drinking and graffiti writing. But the truth is not so
reassuring. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study found
that more than half the downloaders are over 30. They're not
just copping hip-hop.
It is this palpable threat to their survival that has led content
creators to move aggressively into court--led by the major
recording labels. Although copyright laws are clear and well
established and the legal system seems likely to back the music
industry, the results in court have so far been mixed. In July a
San Francisco district court issued a sweeping order that would
have all but shut Napster down. That ruling was immediately
stayed pending appeal. In the meantime, a federal judge in New
York earlier this month slammed a crippling fine on MP3.com--a
company that was trying to operate within the rules of copyright.
Judge Jed Rakoff awarded Universal Music Group damages of $25,000
for each copyrighted CD stored on the popular My.MP3.com
service--a total that could reach $250 million.
Next week the Napster case could come to a head when the two
sides appear before a panel of appeals court judges. The record
companies say they are confident they will prevail. "Napster is a
temporary phenomenon," insists Hilary Rosen, president of the
Recording Industry Association of America.
Perhaps. But peer-to-peer file sharing, it's now clear, is here
to stay. Even if Napster is driven out of business, there are
new, even more intractable sharing systems--notably Gnutella and
Freenet--that allow files to be traded directly from PC to PC,
without going through a single website like Napster's. These
renegade services would be harder to shut down because they have
no centralized plugs to pull, no company officers to sue. Former
Public Enemy rapper Chuck D got it right: trying to stop file
sharing over the Internet, he says, "is like trying to control
the rain."
Does this mean the legal war on Napster is a waste of time? The
music industry thinks not. The labels' immediate goal isn't so
much to stop all online piracy--something even they would concede
is impossible--as to decommercialize it by convincing venture
capitalists that it's not in their self-interest to fund it.
"When we win the Napster case, my hope is people will see it as
more productive to work with the creative community than to
constantly test the law," says Rosen.
It's a tactic that seems to be working, at least in some venues.
The Motion Picture Association of America filed suit in July
against Scour, a Michael Ovitz-backed file-sharing site that was
designed to let users download newly released Hollywood movies.
This month Scour announced it was laying off two-thirds of its
staff. Reason: the litigation had prevented the company from
raising next-round capital.
Meanwhile, the music industry, having learned from the Napster
experience, is struggling to reinvent itself for the new era. At
the forefront of this effort is the Secure Digital Music
Initiative, a consortium of record labels, consumer-electronics
companies and information-technology firms trying to develop new
standards for digital music and the devices that play
it--standards more to its liking than the unprotected MP3 files
being so freely traded. Through a combination of encryption and
watermarks--technology that controls the way in which digital
music is replayed--the sdmi hopes to combine the ease of use and
freedom of choice of Napster while protecting the interests of
artists and their distributors.
It's a laudable goal, but one that will be difficult to achieve.
For one thing, encryption is a tricky, cat-and-mouse game; as
soon as one programmer creates a new software lock, an army of
geeks working out of dorm rooms and dotcoms starts trying to
pick it. It's getting harder and harder for the codemakers to
stay ahead. A few days after Stephen King's e-book Riding the
Bullet was released, hackers broke the code and posted a copy on
the Internet--even though King's book had been available for free
on Amazon.
The other problem with encryption is that no matter how well
protected the disc, at some point it has to be played. And at
that moment, it's unencrypted and can be recorded again. (It's
the same principle that allows you to copy your favorite songs
from the radio with a built-in cassette player.) Even if digital
music could be made 100% secure, as soon as it is released on a
CD it can be "ripped," or copied, onto a computer.
Watermarks may offer another layer of security. These are
digitized instructions, encoded within a musical recording, that
identify the computer it was initially downloaded to and put
limitations on what can be done with the data in the future. If
the watermark limits a recording to a single computer, for
example, another SDMI-compliant device wouldn't be able to play
it.
All this, however, rests on the assumption that SDMI will replace
MP3 as the consumer standard. That won't come about easily, given
how popular and deeply entrenched the MP3 format has become.
Think Beta vs. VHS, only several orders of magnitude more
complex.
Ultimately, the best defense against Napster may be a good
offense. If the recording industry can offer audiophiles a better
product or a more satisfactory experience, either online or in
music stores, its companies may be able to compete--and even
prosper--in a market in which the same music is available free.
This may not be as hard as it sounds. For one thing, it's a lot
easier and more convenient to walk into a music store and buy a
CD than it is to go on the Internet and master the technology of
MP3 file exchange. Napster may be relatively easy to use, but the
process of finding music on another person's computer, figuring
out what it is, downloading the compressed file and turning it
into playable music takes more patience than many think it's
worth.
Even when you've mastered the tricks of trading peer to peer,
there are all sorts of hidden pitfalls. Files can take forever to
download. Servers can crash or go offline before you finish.
Files advertised as containing one song may hold another. Or they
may contain a so-called cuckoo egg--a gotcha message posted by
anti-Napster activists. Last week Napster users downloading the
new Barenaked Ladies single, Pinch Me, and got a version
implanted with a "Trojan horse": a spoken message from the band
telling fans to buy the song instead. Worse still, P2P files may
harbor a file-eating computer virus. The advantage of a record
company's official site is that it has quality control; its files
can be guaranteed free of cuckoo eggs and viruses.
The major record labels are also exploring ways of making the
music experience they provide for paying customers deeper and
richer. "For decades, we've been artificially constrained by the
format of vinyl, by the two sides that play on a record player,"
says Charles Jennings, CEO of Supertracks, a digital-music
distribution company. "That framework is going to be blown away."
The details are still vague, but record companies are talking
about offering such extras as bootleg songs, outtakes, early
access to new releases and more biographical information than can
be squeezed onto a CD's liner notes. They are also talking about
doing something about their pricing structure. "It won't be
$16.99 an album," promises Jennings. Jeff Alger, who works on
e-books for Microsoft Reader, believes bringing down the cost of
CDs is key. "The surest protection against piracy," he says, "is
to make sure there's a high volume of quality, low-priced items
on the market."
What will that new, post-Napster music industry look like? In
some ways, it will be comfortingly familiar. There will still be
CDs and music stores for some time; not all consumers are going
to leap onto the Internet to meet their musical needs. As BMG
Entertainment CEO Strauss Zelnick puts it, "People like packaged
goods."
And despite talk of Internet "disintermediation"--the elimination
of middlemen--there will probably still be agents, producers and
even record companies to sign up new artists and market their
work. Digital-music service providers--the much touted
alternatives to traditional record companies--will probably have a
harder time than major labels taking an album to gold or
platinum. "We'll be fine," says Atlantic Records Group
co-chairman Val Azzoli. "There will always be new music, and it's
our job t o figure out what people want to hear and when they
want to hear it."
But how that music will be delivered--and how it will be paid
for--is still very much in flux, especially if it's delivered
online. Today, music on the Internet is either "streamed"
(delivered in real time, like radio) or packaged into files that
are downloaded all at once. In the future, companies may charge
for these files through subscription (a fixed fee, like a
cable-TV bill, that includes a wide array of musical offerings),
or they may charge for each track separately, either every time
you listen to it (pay for play) or just once (pay for download).
The momentum right now seems to be swinging toward the
subscription model, in which you pay a single monthly fee. In one
form, it might work a lot like cable television. A standard
package might give you access to, say, Top 40, country, hard rock
and rap. There will probably also be premium services--similar to
hbo or Showtime--for more esoteric fare such as classic jazz or
more sought-after music such as recent releases by top acts.
Consumers will enjoy all the benefits of digitized music that
Napster provides, however it's delivered. Once the file is on
their computer, they can make perfect copies (at least for their
own use) and listen to them on a wide variety of new devices,
from digital jukeboxes to pocket-size players that hold hundreds
of songs. "A file liberates music from the limitations of the
real world," says Jupiter Communications' Aram Sinnreich. "With
digitized music you'll be able to listen to music without having
to lug it around."
The early skirmishes in the file-sharing wars have centered on
music. But any industry that trades in intellectual property is
at risk. Scour already offers digital downloads of animations,
short films and movie trailers for feature films. But audio-video
files are big and data-rich and difficult to exchange, even over
the fastest Internet connections. Unless bandwidth improves by
several orders of magnitude, Hollywood's Napsterization is still
some years away.
Book publishing, on the other hand, is feeling some heat today.
Words compress efficiently in computer files, and there are
dozens of classic titles--from Beowulf to Pilgrim's Progress
(neither covered by copyright)--available on sites such as Project
Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.net). If e-books take off, the number of
titles available online could multiply dramatically. All it would
entail would be for some hacker to crack the code on a new
e-book, put the text on a peer-to-peer service and launch it
widely into cyberspace. For that matter, there's little to stop
someone from scanning a newly released title and "blasting it [by
e-mail] to 100,000 people," concedes Steve Cohen, a senior vice
president at St. Martin's Press.
That hasn't happened yet because digital reading just isn't much
fun. E-books, for all the hype, are still clunky and unappealing.
No one seems to want to read anything much longer than a few
paragraphs on a computer screen, and printing a whole book out on
paper is ridiculously expensive and time consuming. You may be
able to get a free version of Beowulf online, but if you're going
to plow through the thing you'll probably want to buy the
paperback.
Book publishers, however, are convinced they won't be spared, and
unlike the music industry--which spent much of the 1990s in a
defensive crouch--they are busily preparing for the inevitable.
From Random House to McGraw-Hill to Simon & Schuster, publishing
houses are racing to digitize their valuable backlists. Some are
also investing heavily in the technology of paper-thin, flexible
screens that could someday be bound into e-books that look and
feel so much like real books you might actually get cozy with
them.
The only thing that is certain in the content business is that
everything is up for grabs. The Internet has turned traditional
business hierarchies upside down. In the pre-Internet era, Rosen
observes, the electronics industry would select a new format for
music--albums, cassettes, eight-tracks or CDs. The record labels
would record to that format, and consumers would buy the end
product. "In the future, the cycle will be working backward," she
says. "Consumers will be dictating the business models, and we'll
be adopting them."
It's a lesson Jim Hedgepath has learned. File sharing has
permanently changed the needlework-pattern business. In part
because of piracy, Pegasus Originals has pared down from nine
pattern artists to two, and its Australian distributor has gone
bankrupt. But Hedgepath has chosen to see the disruption as an
opportunity. He's branched out into Web design and is working on
creating encrypted stitching patterns that people will pay to
download and that can't be passed from computer to computer. If
the volume of sales is large enough, Pegasus could make even
more money than it made before. The rise of PatternPiggies was a
rude shock, but it was also a wake-up call. "I used to tell
pattern sellers to think about where the Internet was going to
fit in their lives," he says. "Now I tell them to think about
where they are going to fit in the Internet." --With reporting
by Mike Eskenazi/New York and David E. Thigpen/Chicago
For more on Napster, Gnutella and other music-sharing software,
go to time.com
GALLERY OF STUFF
WURLITZER FUN E-JUKEBOX
www.wurlitzer-jukebox.com
A new twist on the diner classic. This jukebox downloads music
from the website MP3.com.
PRICE: Three plays for $1
AUDIOREQUEST
audiorequest.com
Tired of listening to MP3s on your tinny little computer
speakers? AudioRequest is an MP3 player that fits in with the
rest of your high-end stereo components. (It plays CDs too.)
PRICE: $799.95
RAVE MP2200
www.ravemp.com
One of the best all-around portable MP3 players. It has 64 MB of
memory (about two hours of music), a voice recorder, an FM tuner,
even a tiny equalizer, and it runs on a single AA battery.
PRICE: $279.95
NOMAD JUKEBOX
www.nomadworld.com
A stylish portable MP3 player that dwarfs the competition with
its whopping 6-GB hard drive. That represents about 100 hours of
music, packed into a device the size of your average CD player.
It weighs a mere 14 oz.
PRICE: $499
CASIO WMP-1V WRIST AUDIO PLAYER
www.casio.com
Digital music, Dick Tracy-style. This chunky wristwatch doubles
as a full-featured MP3 player that stores more than 30 minutes of
CD-quality music and plays it through headphones.
PRICE: $249
EGO
www.myaudio2go.com
Designed for use in a car. The eGo sticks to your windshield
with suction cups and plugs into your cigarette-lighter socket.
The price includes 64 MB of memory.
PRICE: $269
P2P Tools: How to Get Started
DOWNLOADS
FILE-SHARING SOFTWARE
Aimster
www.aimster.com
Combines the file sharing of Napster with AOL's Instant
Messenger. Share files only with people on your Buddy List
Gnutella
www.gnutellanet.com
Similar to Napster, but Gnutella doesn't rely on a central
server, and it can handle all types of files, from simple text to
video and 3-D graphics
Macster
www.macster.com
A version of Napster for Macintosh computers
Mactella
www.cxc.com
A version of Gnutella for Macintosh computers
Napster
www.napster.com
The original file-sharing killer app. Slick and easy to use. It
handles only MP3s and runs only on Windows computers
MP3 PLAYERS
MusicMatch Jukebox
www.musicmatch.com
The best free MP3 player for Mac users. Includes many extra
features, including a handy music organizer. Also available
for Windows
RealJukebox 2 Basic
www.real.com/jukebox
Popular, stable and easy to use. Includes extra features like
playlists for managing your MP3s
Winamp
www.winamp.com
The top-rated free MP3-player software for Windows
Windows Media Player
www.windowsmedia.com/download
Microsoft's entry. Comprehensive and user friendly but limits
your ability to copy CDs
ACCESSORIES
Skinz.org
www.skinz.org
Customize your MP3 software's appearance
Pakster
pakster.homestead.com
Clever software that disguises any file as an MP3 file, to get
around Napster's MP3s-only rule
HELP
STEP BY STEP
About.com--MP3/MIDI Music
mp3.about.com
Annotated links to file sharing and digital-music resources
CNet.com--Music
music.cnet.com
A collection of tutorials and good advice, including how to turn
CDs into MP3s
Gnutella Tutorial
www.gnutellanews.com/information/tutorial.shtml
Absolutely essential for the first-time user
Napster Tutorial
www.napster.com/help/tutorial.html
Walks you through the process of downloading, installing and
getting the most out of Napster
ZDNet Music
music.zdnet.com
Includes tutorials for both Napster and Gnutella, as well as
news, articles, links and more.
A comprehensive resource
NEWS
LATEST HEADLINES
Gnutellanews
www.gnutellanews.com
Clearinghouse for news on file sharing, as well as tips,
resources, downloads and links
Napster Online
www.icashex.com/napster
Read and discuss the latest Napster-related news
NapsterMP3
www.napstermp3.com
Pro file-sharing news, discussions, petitions and resources
Slashdot
www.slashdot.org
Where hackers go for high-tech news online
THE DEBATE
FOR AND AGAINST
alt.music.mp3.napster
alt.music.mp3.napster
Freewheeling Usenet discussion of file-sharing issues
Fairtunes.com
www.fairtunes.com
Pangs of conscience? Fairtunes provides an easy way to send money
to the artists behind your MP3s
Metallica's Napster FAQ
www.metallica.com/news/2000/napfaq.html
Heavy-metal rockers and outspoken Napster critics, Metallica band
members explain their position
MP3.com--Your Music, Your Rights
www.mp3.com/my/news/yourmusic.html
An impressively balanced collection of essays, links and legal
documents for those concerned about the ethics of swapping
music and other files online
Napster, by All of the Top Cartoonists
cagle.slate.msn.com/news/napster
A comprehensive archive of political cartoons about the Napster
controversy
The Recording Industry Association of America
www.riaa.com
The RIAA is leading the legal fight against Napster. Its site is
host to a discussion of the issues, the lawsuit and a collection
of related documents
|