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.''
Wrecking the watermark is a lot easier than forging it -- only if you could forge it could you get away with piracy with no consequences. If you can merely wreck it, you will be in the position of someone who reads a ripped-cover paperback -- it's clear to others that you've gotten the product without contributing any revenues to the author or publisher and have participated in an illegal scam (even if your part in it was not technically illegal, you should have been aware that the person selling you the ripped-cover book was almost certainly breaking the law).
Not unless you're prepared to ignore the bulk of contract law for the last few hundred years. Many, many shareware licenses have clauses like this one, chosen basically at random (I have no idea what Artpol Software does - I've never heard of them):
Licensee may install this program to test and evaluate for 30 days; after that time Licensee must either purchase a license to use this program or delete it from the computer hard drive. Licensee may allow other users to evaluate copies of the unregistered Shareware. All evaluation users are subject to the terms of this agreement.
Unless you're of the opinion that EULA's are not legally enforceable contracts, that makes one civilly liable for violating the terms of this agreement, or, for egregious violators, exposed to that animal known as criminal copyright infringement.
If you can merely wreck it, you will be in the position of someone who reads a ripped-cover paperback -- it's clear to others that you've gotten the product without contributing any revenues to the author or publisher and have participated in an illegal scam.
Appealing to the public's sense of morality is a losing proposition, because most people simply don't see this as a moral issue, any more than they see speeding tickets or fouls in a rec-league basketball game as moral issues.
So you can see who's violating copyright more easily. So what? Going to sue or imprison all x million of them? Of course not. They'll pick the most sizeable violators, and crucify them to make a public example of them. And when that doesn't work, then what?
Those x million people are not going to take kindly to attempts to make them criminals, any more than the people of your state would take kindly to the police rigidly and vigilantly enforcing the speed limits under all circumstances and in all places and times. They simply won't stand for it, even though the police doing so would be perfectly legal and enforceable. Drag enough people into court for what they see as the cyberspace equivalent of 46-mph-in-a-45-mph-zone, and you'll see a backlash like you wouldn't believe.
(This issue is not going to go away.)
You assume that people over 30 give a rat's patootie about the latest music. Or that people under 30 give a rat's posterior about fine points of law. There was once a prefect digital medium (from the artist's point of view). It was called digital audio tape. I can't recall ever seeing one.
Once the info is free in the analog state, it can always be recaptured. There is, however, no substitute for the live performance. Arguing as to the quality of the copy (of a live performance) is analogous (and just as futile) to arguing as to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Digital copies vs. scratched analog copies is really not the issue. A copy is a copy and NOT the original performance. It is a memory of the live performance.
In practice, that doesn't help you much, because proving the existence of a watermark without revealing the methodology behind the insertion (say, for example, when you go into court to sue someone for piracy) is different problem than preventing an attacker from detecting the watermark on his own and manipulating it. This paper (and this paper and this paper, and this paper, and lots more, too) is an example of the level of sophistication detecting digital watermarks has reached. The only real long-term solution is tighter control of the formats that media are distributed in - watermarking is just a new battlefield for another endless arms race between publishers and pirates...
It's not simply a symmetrical arms race. In ordinary cryptography, the code-makers left the code-breakers in the dust many years ago, and the same thing is happening in steganography for the same underlying mathematical reasons.
Why, because it's encrypted? The last paper I linked directly addresses spatial spread-spectrum watermarks...
It's not simply a symmetrical arms race. In ordinary cryptography, the code-makers left the code-breakers in the dust many years ago, and the same thing is happening in steganography for the same underlying mathematical reasons.
LOL. I could talk about how differential cryptanalysis made the codebreaker's job a little bit easier, or how everyone was just sure that the quadratic sieve was the fastest factorization method until Pollard came up with the number field sieve, but I'll merely suggest an analogy, so that we can think outside the box for a moment....
The government is easily the biggest, best-funded research organization in the world of cryptography. Easily. And, of course, the most secure, most difficult-to-crack ciphers are put to work by the military, so that they might communicate without anyone eavesdropping.
And yet, for all that, from 1967 to 1985, the Soviets were able to read virtually every single secure message that the US Navy sent. And it only cost them a few hundred thousand dollars to do it, whereas it cost the Navy well over a billion dollars to fix the problem once they discovered it.
So, how much will the keys to your watermarks be worth? Will it even be as much as a few hundred thousand dollars? If someone can be found who will sell out an entire nation for a few hundred thousand dollars, how much will it take to entice someone to sell out an organization as degenerately awful as a record label?
I have my doubts as to the practical invulnerability of any watermarking method - the RIAA can't even keep its own website up, after all - never mind the theoretical invulnerability. In the end, the codebreakers always have an ace up their sleeves. You can hide your data any way you see fit, and encrypt it any way you like, using any method(s) you want, but if it's important enough to me, I'll always be able to get at it, no matter what you do. The stronger the cryptography becomes, the weaker the human links become, relatively speaking...
Yes, but the encryption makes the spatial spread-spectrum analysis look normal, modulo a minuscule increase in overall data "noisiness", undetectable if the size of the watermark info is much smaller than the size of the data
LOL. I could talk about how differential cryptanalysis made the codebreaker's job a little bit easier, or how everyone was just sure that the quadratic sieve was the fastest factorization method until Pollard came up with the number field sieve,
"A little" bit doesn't cut it, and the differences between the two sieve messages are trivial compared with their astronomical slowness on inputs with thousands of digits, and "everyone was just sure that the quadratic sieve was the fastest" is either meaningless, or trivially correct (if what everyone was sure of was that the quadratic sieve was the fastest algorithm discovered up to that time), or trivially wrong (if what everyone was sure of was that the quadratic sieve was the fastest theoretically possible factorization algorithm).
but I'll merely suggest an analogy, so that we can think outside the box for a moment.... The government is easily the biggest, best-funded research organization in the world of cryptography. Easily. And, of course, the most secure, most difficult-to-crack ciphers are put to work by the military, so that they might communicate without anyone eavesdropping. And yet, for all that, from 1967 to 1985, the Soviets were able to read virtually every single secure message that the US Navy sent. And it only cost them a few hundred thousand dollars to do it, whereas it cost the Navy well over a billion dollars to fix the problem once they discovered it.
Those were old-style single-private-key ciphers, not modern public-private-key ciphers
So, how much will the keys to your watermarks be worth? Will it even be as much as a few hundred thousand dollars? If someone can be found who will sell out an entire nation for a few hundred thousand dollars, how much will it take to entice someone to sell out an organization as degenerately awful as a record label?
Each published CD will have its own published public key. If the record label is stupid enough to allow the thousands of corresponding private keys to all be compromised, they'll deserve what they get.
I have my doubts as to the practical invulnerability of any watermarking method - the RIAA can't even keep its own website up, after all - never mind the theoretical invulnerability. In the end, the codebreakers always have an ace up their sleeves. You can hide your data any way you see fit, and encrypt it any way you like, using any method(s) you want, but if it's important enough to me, I'll always be able to get at it, no matter what you do. The stronger the cryptography becomes, the weaker the human links become, relatively speaking...
You haven't grasped one of the major benefits of public-key cryptography, which is that it greatly reduces the potential number of compromisable human links. There will always be some, but that doesn't vitiate my point that digital watermarks can be made so strong that only a risky insider betrayal could crack them, a big improvement over the current protocols.
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