Free music or stealing?

WHEN Lucila Crena, a freshman at Emory University in Atlanta, turns off the light in her dormitory room at night to go to sleep, her computer is still working hard.

``There'll be like 30 things downloading at once,'' she says. By ``things,'' she means songs she is downloading illegally using Kazaa, a Napster-like program the music industry is trying to put out of business.

``Right now it's all Christmas songs,'' she says, ``but I've got a lot of swing and tango.'' She estimates she has 1,200 songs on her hard drive.

Her roommate, Jolyn Taylor, agrees that downloading music on the Internet is wrong, but he does it also.

Trent Reznor, lead singer of the rock group Nine Inch Nails, has something to say to the Emory roommates: ``Just because technology exists where you can duplicate something, that doesn't give you the right to do it. Once I record something, it's not public domain to give it away freely.''

Crena and Taylor have technology and the sheer weight of numbers on their side. According to a new poll by Ipsos-Reid, an independent marketing research company, more than 60 million Americans have downloaded music via the Internet - more than one-quarter of the population older than 12. Kazaa, one of the most popular downloading programs (also called file-sharing, because they allow individual computer users to share their files), is growing at a rate of almost 300 percent per year.

Reznor - along with a massive cohort of popular musicians including Missy Elliott, Neil Young, the Dixie Chicks, DMX and Elton John - have the law and morality on their side.

But the side with the law and morality appears to be losing, at least in the hearts and minds of music fans.

The result is the biggest disconnect between the law and otherwise law-abiding citizens since the days of Prohibition. Tens of millions of people are blithely breaking the law - and they know it. And most of the time, they just don't see what they're doing as particularly wrong.

``Some people don't know what's right to do, and some people don't want to do what's right,'' says Frank Breeden, president of the Gospel Music Association. The GMA is one of many organizations that work with the Recording Industry Association of America , which spearheads lobbying, lawsuits and educational campaigns to try to stem the downloading tide.

``People see this as an invisible, seemingly victimless activity, when the truth is it hurts the ultimate small business person, and that's the songwriter,'' who does not collect royalties, Breeden adds.

Randy Cohen, who writes the weekly ``Ethicist'' column for The New York Times Magazine, says he gets regular mail from music downloaders who realize that what they're doing isn't really right.

``They're hoping I can justify it for them,'' he says. But he won't. ``The central moral point is that you can't take someone's work without their permission.'' he says.

But Cohen acknowledges that the widespread nature and extreme ease of downloading music have made it a unique situation.

``People do this who would never in a million years go into a store and swipe a CD. Something a lot different is happening. There are temptations no ordinary human can resist,'' he says. ``And from the point of view of a kid, the music is already on her computer. It's all very good to say it's wrong, but the kids will just take it.''

Indeed, downloading is more a young people's game. The Ipsos-Reid poll found that more than 60 percent of people age 12 to 24 have downloaded music from the Net, compared with 19 percent of those 35 to 54.

``The students do not see anything wrong with it,'' says J.T. Gilbert, who teaches religious education at St. Pius X High School in Atlanta. ``(But) I don't necessarily blame my students for their naivete. To me the parents are the moral guides to their children's life. What we cover at school needs to be followed at home.''

Cohen blames the record industry for allowing matters to get to this point by overcharging for CDs and being slow to set up legal downloading systems.

In fact, just about everybody blames the record industry (except people who work for the record industry).

``I can't come up with an ethical argument to defend downloading, but I feel like I'm ripping off some big corporation, which doesn't feel as bad,'' says Mike Garmisa, an Emory senior. ``Companies are definitely fixing CD prices, and artists are getting such a small percent of the price.''

CD sales are down about 11 percent so far this year compared with last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan, while sales of blank CDs are expected to jump more than 40 percent this year, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Critics of the industry say there's no proven link between declining CD sales and soaring music downloading; the industry says it's obvious what's happening.

In addition to legal remedies - the industry is trying to put several file-sharing companies out of business, just as it did Napster - the record labels have also pushed their artists front and center in an attempt to convince downloaders that what they are doing is wrong.

A new group funded by the Recording Industry Association, called MUSIC (Music United for Strong Internet Copyright) has started a series of TV ads and a Web site (www.musicunited.org) featuring musicians speaking directly to their fans.

``We really look at it as stealing, because ... you're not paying for it,'' says hip-hop star Nelly.

``I'm all for getting a taste of something before you buy it, but when it becomes more than a taste and people begin hoarding the entire work, it becomes piracy, which results in a system in which artists are not being rewarded for their work,'' says Vanessa Carlton, who broke out earlier this year with the hit ``A Thousand Miles.'' Others, from Luciano Pavarotti to Eminem, also sound off on the group's Web site.

Ken Vaux, a fellow at the Center for Ethics and Values in the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, doubts the campaign will work on kids who have come to expect free downloadable music as virtually an entitlement.

``They'll say Eminem is 100 times a millionaire. Who cares if he doesn't get a royalty?''

The best solution, practically everyone agrees, would be for the record labels to set up their own system, where fans could download music legally for a reasonable fee.

``The record companies have only themselves to blame. They're dragging their feet, hoping they can still charge 20 bucks for a CD,'' says Cohen.

The labels have made a tentative start, with fee-based systems like MusicNet and PressPlay. But the systems still have huge gaps in their music libraries - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Alicia Keys, No Doubt and Billy Joel are among many major musicians not yet available. All are available on free, but illegal, systems like Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster.

``It's still wrong to do this,'' Cohen says, ``but the law has to seem reasonable to people.''

Somehow I doubt the artists would feel the same way. But since it's their product, why not just wait for them to "see the light" and start giving it away? It's bound to happen any day now, right?

Err, clickez-vous here and see that they are. 'Course, it's probably distinguishable because the Baen Free Library is for written works of fiction rather than music...

Earlier, I mentioned "two reasons" we were doing this, and stated that the first was what you might call a demonstration of principle. What's the second?
Common sense, applied to the practical reality of commercial publishing. Or, if you prefer, the care and feeding of authors and publishers. Or, if you insist on a single word, profit.
I will make no bones about it (and Jim, were he writing this, would be gleefully sucking out the marrow). We expect this Baen Free Library to make us money by selling books.
How? As I said above, for the same reason that any kind of book distribution which provides free copies to people has always, throughout the history of publishing, eventually rebounded to the benefit of the author.
Take, for instance, the phenomenon of people lending books to their friends — a phenomenon which absolutely dwarfs, by several orders of magnitude, online piracy of copyrighted books.
What's happened here? Has the author "lost a sale?"
Well. . . yeah, in the short run — assuming, of course, that said person would have bought the book if he couldn't borrow it. Sure. Instead of buying a copy of the author's book, the Wretched Scoundrel Borrower (with the Lender as his Accomplice) has "cheated" the author. Read his work for free! Without paying for it!
The same thing happens when someone checks a book out of a public library — a "transaction" which, again, dwarfs by several orders of magnitude all forms of online piracy. The author only collects royalties once, when the library purchases a copy. Thereafter. . .
Robbed again! And again, and again!
Yet. . . yet. . .
I don't know any author, other than a few who are — to speak bluntly — cretins, who hears about people lending his or her books to their friends, or checking them out of a library, with anything other than pleasure. Because they understand full well that, in the long run, what maintains and (especially) expands a writer's audience base is that mysterious magic we call: word of mouth.
Word of mouth, unlike paid advertising, comes free to the author — and it's ten times more effective than any kind of paid advertising, because it's the one form of promotion which people usually trust.
That being so, an author can hardly complain — since the author paid nothing for it either. And it is that word of mouth, percolating through the reading public down a million little channels, which is what really puts the food on an author's table. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
Think about it. How many people lend a book to a friend with the words: "You ought a read this! It's really terrible!"
How many people who read a book they like which they obtained from a public library never mention it to anyone? As a rule, in my experience, people who frequently borrow books from libraries are bibliophiles. And bibliophiles, in my experience, usually can't refrain from talking about books they like.
And, just as important — perhaps most important of all — free books are the way an audience is built in the first place. How many people who are low on cash and for that reason depend on libraries or personal loans later rise on the economic ladder and then buy books by the very authors they came to love when they were borrowing books?
Practically every reader, that's who. Most readers of science fiction and fantasy develop that interest as teenagers, mainly from libraries. That was certainly true of me. As a teenager, I couldn't afford to buy the dozen or so Robert Heinlein novels I read in libraries. Nor could I afford the six-volume Lensmen series by "Doc" Smith. Nor could I afford any of the authors I became familiar with in those days: Arthur Clarke, James H. Schmitz, you name it.

Eric Flint, First Librarian, Baen Free Library.

I was wondering about that. Sounds about right.

Having said that, I should point out that it is true; exposure to bright light especially UV loaded camera flash light, causes oxidation of art materials. It's the same process that makes newspapers turn colors after being left in direct sunlight for a while.

However, I'm pretty sure that the acceleration in decomposition is rather like the Alar scare; where the dose required to see significant decomposition within a lifetime would require, say, near-continous flasbulb popping.

If anyone doesn't remember the Alar thing, it was a pesticide which used to be applied to apple trees, and ended up in the apple juice made from said apples. It's carcinogenic in lab rats, but the concentration was so low and dose required to cause cancer in humans, would have need to drink something like 19,000 quarts of apple juice a day.

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