Posted on 12/30/2002 5:11:11 PM PST by Drippy
Free music, or stealing? By PHIL KLOER Cox News Service
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.
And yet, she acknowledges, when asked directly, ``I think it's wrong.''
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.''
There you have the battle lines.
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.
That makes it an issue for teachers to grapple with sometimes.
``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.''
The music industry is fighting all this with every resource it has.
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.''
I wasn't hiding. Unlike you. My grandkids could have done it in one minute.
Because it would be for profit. It wouldn't be right to duplicate and sell or profit from other people's work whether it was copywrited or not.
Another analogy....I know you hate them, but here goes......
Joe designs a rocking chair. Anyone can build one, but his is special. People like it and some buy it. The chair seems pricey to most people.
Some people just like the special air-filled cushion. They would like to buy just that, but it is not offered without buying the whole enchalada.
A person who has bought the chair decides to let people duplicate the cushion FOR FREE.
When the chair maker finds out what's happening does/should he:
1. Immediately start producing original chair cushions and put them on the market.
2. Cry and say he's losing money. Although none of the people getting the cushion would have bought the whole chair anyway.
3. Figure our a way to punish the guy that is answering the demand for the cushions even though he's doing it for free.
4. Lower the price of the chair by 50% and sell 500% more chairs.
I pick 32 random 0.1-second segments of the music and don't tell anybody which they are.
For each one, I increase the amplitude by 1% ("1") or decrease it by 1% ("0").
When I get the pirated music I compare with the original and extract the 4-byte serial number. (4 bytes is enough, no one will sell more than 4 billion copies of a CD -- if they did everyone in the world would have one and piracy would be silly.)
This will survive MP3ing or any other process that doesn't ruin the sound -- even if you just put a microphone to the speaker and re-record and re-digitize the output, the 1% shifts will be detectable easily by looking at the waveforms (even though they will not be detectable to the human ear).
There are more complex ways to do this that are completely undetectable. The scheme I outlined above has the flaw that I could buy several CDs and compare them, figure out exactly where the slightly altered segments were, and reverse-engineer to get the original -- but with "RSA encryption" and "error-correcting codes" and some additional mathematical tricks that can be thwarted too. Do you need more details?
Ultimately this technology will allow the songwriter to bypass recording companies entirely, so in this case immoral means will likely achieve a moral end.
That said, it's still theft.
What happens when I normalize the volume based on the RMS amplitude?
Presumably, you could plant it in a section of the music that had a sustained note or chord or other sound. It could even be a very short section, since you only need to hide four bytes across 44,100 samples per second. As long as the original piece of the song maintained a constant volume from beginning to end, you could tell from the context whether a particular sample was 1% louder or softer. And since it's all stuffed into a few milliseconds of audio, it goes by too fast for your ear to pick it up.
The only problem is that this would be extremely easy to detect and wipe out, I think.
If you are normalizing over time intervals much longer than 0.1 second you will degrade the perceived sound quality, and you still won't obscure the information totally -- for example, if the RMS amplitude is 1% higher over an 0.1-second interval, it will be 0.1% higher over a 1-second interval, still detectable as long as the 0.1-second altered blips are more than 1 second apart.
You can also multiply the amplitude by a slowly varying factor between 0.99 and 1.01, identifying 32 checkpoints to extract the 1 or 0 bit, which would smooth out things so that you could never tell what the original "should be".
The same reason it wouldn't be wrong not to profit from other people's work.
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