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.''
No, I didn't ignore anything of the sort. My argument stems from the legal, moral and long term consequences of this downloading.
Regardless of what Mr. Lewis thinks about it, that is the focus of the article we are commenting upon.
People who steal.
Again, what's going to happen is either:
1) There will be fewer artists.
2) Sophisticated means of copy protection will be mandated by law, effectively punishing the majority for the actions of a few.
3) Both.
Don't fool yourself, this is very likely and in fact has already been discussed. Remember what happened when the insurance companies decided they wanted everyone to wear a seatbelt?
Make no mistake, if this continues it will be addressed at some point. Of course, folks like me who don't do this "downloading" will just be punished right along with all the rest.
Times have changed. Technology has progressed. The issue is sharing. The new technology improves the efficiency of sharing.
Why shouldn't I be able to share my collection of older CDs with those who are willing to share their newly purchased CDs.
Note that there are only so many hours in the day. Most people listen to but one tune at a time. One can't take "full" advantage of the semi-infinite number of tunes available to for enjoyment. There is an upper bound on how far this can go. The technology improves the efficiency of the consumers' entertainment $. Live music is still the most desireable. Musicians will still be compensated.
It's a market situation where the record companies are just going to have to adapt to the new, technological driven efficiency of using recorded music.
No, I am not willing to do that.
They have as much right to call their congressman and complain as you and I do.
Just because you become a business owner or executive doesn't mean you lose your first amendment right to free speech.
Be no reason to have it..
No, the point is that it would be CHEAPER to buy or download this watermarked music because the record company wouldn't need to worry so much about piracy. If you are paying to download, they automatically know your PayPal ID and email address or some comparable identifier, and it doesn't cost you anything extra. If you are buying a physical CD at the record store and you want to pay cash, you pay full price but get a rebate when you send in the card with your name and address.
Databases are cheap to maintain now. My 80GB hard drive could easily handle all the record purchases in the USA for a month.
I'm not saying this is the right way to go, just making the point that it's technically reasonable to implement. I wish the record companies would wake up and realize they could do a lot better than this with a different business model, but this would at least be better than what they have. It's a bad situation now because of the "moral hazard" -- a certain type of unethical and illegal activity has become quite a bit easier to get away with.
I also wish that the artists would wake up and realize they don't have to idiotically sign away their rights with the same boilerplate contract language that has been used for decades.
I'm not, but I'm serious about putting it to the test. I assume you have a working implementation of this? Why not put out a watermarked audio file, and let me hammer on it for a while? Let's find out if your watermark is as robust as you hope it is ;)
The point is not to make copying impossible, just to make HIGH-QUALITY copying SUFFICIENTLY difficult that people will buy the CDs instead, and this is certainly achievable.
Come, now - you're obviously smart enough to spot the flaw in that kind of plan. Namely, it only takes one person figuring out the magic formula for munging your watermark to kill your plan stone-dead, just like it only took one person figuring out the way the DVD CSS system works, and how to beat it, in order to render it totally ineffective at stopping anyone from copying DVD's at will. And that's because the next step is to write a program to automate the munging process, and make it available to everyone.
Just ask Jake Johanssen. High-quality from-scratch copies of DVD's are well beyond the abilities of most people, but pointing and clicking is not. And it doesn't matter that the vast majority of people have no idea how DeCSS works, or how later, cleverer solutions work, or what you'd have to do to go about solving the CSS problem for yourself, because they don't need to know those things. Some clever person did the hard work for them. You don't need a whole planet full of smart people to kill a scheme like this - you only need one ;)
I don't have this implemented, I just know that the theory of it works -- it's my own scheme, inspired by the postings on this thread. Trust me, I have the Computer Science background to know this is doable -- feel free to implement it yourself and try to patent it, I'm sure you will find someone has beaten you to it.
Come, now - you're obviously smart enough to spot the flaw in that kind of plan. Namely, it only takes one person figuring out the magic formula for munging your watermark to kill your plan stone-dead, just like it only took one person figuring out the way the DVD CSS system works, and how to beat it, in order to render it totally ineffective at stopping anyone from copying DVD's at will. And that's because the next step is to write a program to automate the munging process, and make it available to everyone.
There are actually two separate kinds of piracy problem this is trying to address.
The first is simply to make it difficult for people to untraceably copy their CDs and give them to their friends who then won't have to pay the record company and the artist. My scheme certainly does this, because it becomes provable who bought the original copy of the music. This is not really compromised by allowing people to pay extra for an anonymous cash purchase -- you're balancing a lot of little thefts against a lot of little extra bits of revenue. A pirate would always be able to get hold of the music without identifyng himself anyway, by stealing a CD.
The second problem is the large-scale commercial pirate who munges the watermark or provides software for others to do it. The beauty of my scheme is that even if he does this, it is still provable that the music has been tampered with because the watermark is munged. Many people will have illegal munged copies of the music, but they will all be identifiable as munged (someone who has an unidentified UNmunged copy will be able to say that he paid cash, so there is no evidence he did anything wrong, but someone who has a munged copy is in the position of a person who bought a paperback book with the cover missing, prima facie evidence of participation in an illegal activity).
The place public-key encryption comes in -- it allows the record company to provide free software which will make it easy for anyone to READ a watermark or see that the watermark has been munged, without allowing people to create their own watermarks or easily munge them. This could be a feature in apps like RealPlayer -- when you play the music file, the serial number of the copy it came from is displayed.
If I did that it would cost me an extra $5 a week. The discounts are worth the sacrifice in privacy for me, as they are for almost all the supermarket's patrons. Voluntary exchange, nothing wrong with it. Why is what Shop-Rite does a good and ethical business practice while doing it for music would be bad?
So I take it you also think 'sharing' (e.g. pirating) software is okay?
Oh, I'm sure it has. But I have a few ideas on how to attack it, and a little CS background myself. And I also know there are people out there that are smarter than me, who are much more serious about attacking it than I would be ;)
The first is simply to make it difficult for people to untraceably copy their CDs and give them to their friends who then won't have to pay the record company and the artist. My scheme certainly does this, because it becomes provable who bought the original copy of the music.
The economics of the plan are not working in your favor. Essentially, you can no longer have a single master copy, from which you press your millions of copies for individual sale. Each copy has to be unique, which means that you have to have some way of inserting a unique watermark on to each individual disk during the copying process. While I'm sure this is eminently doable, I'm also pretty sure that nobody has implemented a means for doing this yet, meaning you have to create your own disk production facility from scratch, rather than simply using the existing industry-standard solutions for pressing ten million CD's. Your watermarked disks are inevitably going to be more expensive than non-watermarked disks, or less profitable than non-watermarked disks, until you recover the costs of such a watermarking process.
The second problem is the large-scale commercial pirate who munges the watermark or provides software for others to do it. The beauty of my scheme is that even if he does this, it is still provable that the music has been tampered with because the watermark is munged. Many people will have illegal munged copies of the music, but they will all be identifiable as munged.
And then what? You can make a pretty good inference about the legal ownership of music available through P2P systems now, but what good is that? Unless you have some means of enforcing your desires, it does you no good to merely be aware that 10,000 people have an illegal copy of your hit song.
The place public-key encryption comes in -- it allows the record company to provide free software which will make it easy for anyone to READ a watermark or see that the watermark has been munged, without allowing people to create their own watermarks or easily munge them.
That's fine, if you can eliminate and replace Red Book audio with some secure format from the get-go. For downloadable music that you sell, you can probably make it work. But audio CD's are not encrypted, and can't be encrypted without breaking literally billions of CD players out there. Consumers are not likely to be enamored of an album that requires them to buy a whole new stereo to listen to it. And then you're back to square one, limited by the fact that the standard consumer audio format is totally insecure. It's just plain old PCM audio, with no encryption or anything, and no security beyond your ability to make robust watermarks.
You can watermark to your heart's content, but once you stick it on a Red Book audio CD, you've abandoned any hopes of preventing people from ripping it and trading it. If your watermark holds up, you'll be able to identify the illegal copies, but then again, big deal. Last I checked, there are something like 60 million P2P users worldwide, and that number is growing quite rapidly. We're going to need a lot more prison space if you think you can seriously make a dent via enforcement ;)
This could be a feature in apps like RealPlayer -- when you play the music file, the serial number of the copy it came from is displayed.
Unless you have total control of my computer, hardware and software, any solution that depends on a trusted client is doomed, doomed, doomed. Even for a secure, encrypted audio format. How long will it take someone to disassemble your player and pipe the output someplace you'd prefer it didn't go?
The manufacturing is not the problem, in the software industry they routinely make a hundred thousand unique but functionally equivalent CDs in one run.
A big difference from the current system is that nobody is restricting file-sharing software like Napster which has plenty of legitimate uses. The problem now is that once you have the music on your hard drive no one can tell where you got it from, whether you read it from your own CD or illegally downloaded it from a hacker network. With my system, legal innocent activity is utterly unrestricted.
You can make a pretty good inference about the legal ownership of music available through P2P systems now
Not true, these systems have legit uses; and the difference between "a pretty good inference" and legal proof is important. Atlas publishers and dictionary publishers routinely introduce tiny intentional mistakes into their work to snare illegal copyists, and that stands up in court -- this would be similar.
You misunderstood me on encryption. I wasn't recommending that players be crippled so they can't play old music -- just that the DISPLAY the watermark if there is one, while still playing the music if there isn't. I'm not encrypting the whole watermarked audio -- I have regular audio with an encrypted watermark. Get the difference?
I don't care if I can't trust the client machine. I'm NOT trying to place restrictions on how you can listen to something! I'm just making sure that an evidentiary trail remains in order to discourage you doing something illegal. The user's experience is exactly the same as before. And you may copy the file and give it to whomever you want -- but if you do so illegally you will have more to worry about than before, because it is no longer "a perfect crime". The RealPlayer app displaying the serial number or a "munged" flag is a feature that is there for SOCIAL reasons -- remember the analogy with ripped-cover paperbacks or notch-jacketed LPs. You may have a circle of friends who views such things with equanimity, but for some the disapproval factor will be there.
The RealPlayer app displaying the serial number or a "munged" flag is a feature that is there for SOCIAL reasons -- remember the analogy with ripped-cover paperbacks or notch-jacketed LPs. You may have a circle of friends who views such things with equanimity, but for some the disapproval factor will be there.
LOL. I don't think it's a matter of anyone's circle of friends - the history of payments on the honor system is not a particularly positive one. Ask any author of a reasonably popular shareware program what he thinks the rate of payment is among people who regularly use his program - and then realize that he's fooling himself if he tells you much more than about 10%, and in my experience, 5% is usually closer still to the actual truth.
And then, of course, many people will find their consciences assuaged by simply using a player that doesn't read or recognize such a watermark. And all this is still assuming that your watermark is robust enough to survive dedicated, repeated attempts to find a method of wrecking it, which, as I've noted, I have my doubts about...
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