Online Swapshop
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday July 6, 2000
It's easier than ever to find and copy files on the Internet - with big consequences for copyright. But what makes kids think that piracy and bartering are the best business models for the network economy? By Michael Dwyer.
Never mind the stable door. The horse, last seen wearing a portable MP3-player headset and carrying a saddlebag full of burned CDs, has well and truly bolted. Music is now free if you want it. From Chopin to Charlie Parker to the latest Pearl Jam blockbuster, it's about as fast and easy to acquire online as it is via a round trip to the CD store. Sorry: make that faster - and easier.
The same goes for photographs, videos, software programs and computer games. In fact, practically anything that can be digitally encoded and stored on
a hard drive connected to the Internet is yours for the taking. Unless, that is, you're troubled by the conventional moral implications of stealing intellectual property.
The file-swapping black market has flourished in recent months with the growth of online directory services such as Napster, which allows music fans to peruse and pilfer the MP3 libraries of thousands of other users. For junior Napster members such as WolfEyes, it's like Christmas has arrived for keeps.
"Paying for CDs is like ... soooo 1999, dude," he sneers in a chat group posting that is typical in its tone of contempt, for copyright specifically and corporate authority in general. Nor is he fazed by legal pressure applied to Napster and My.MP3.com by the Recording Industry Association of America and rock bands including Metallica and Dr Dre.
"What can they do besides ban you from the Napster servers?" WolfEyes wants to know. "Nothing. Not a damn thing. Fine, ban me from the Napster servers. That's easy to get around anyway."
Given the growth of more broadly-based, decentralised file sharing applications like Gnutella, Scour and Wrapster, he's right. And "wrong" is a highly debatable concept in the global swap shop that the Internet is fast becoming.
Music fan Louise, 20, regularly visits www.napster.com to search other people's MP3 directories and download songs she's heard on the radio. "As far as I'm concerned, it's just like lending a CD to a friend or listening to the radio," she says. "We're just sharing the music.
"I don't think you're ripping artists off if you're not making money out of it yourself. I understand the artists' perspective: That's mine, you should pay me money to use it. But in the long run they tend to make so much money that I don't see what the problem is."
Especially when there's no evidence that MP3 hunters and collectors were going to buy an artist's CD in the first place. For a new generation of network economy consumers, CDs are simply too expensive to bother about. And when there's so much variety at her fingertips, Louise finds most albums boring after four songs anyway.
She likes to compile her own MP3 playlists, convert them to .wav files, burn them onto two-dollar CD blanks and play them in her car: just like young people have been doing with audio cassettes for decades, but with a negligible loss of sound quality and a song library a few thousand times the size of your big sister's record collection.
"This is the instant gratification generation," says Sam King, vice president of MP3.com.au. "These kids want their music straight away? If they can't get it cheaply and easily, then they are going to pirate it."
As old-fashioned law enforcement becomes less feasible, this sounds suspiciously like the new golden rule of music dissemination. And the model music distribution follows today will apply to all other digital content tomorrow.
Jeff, 19, an IT consultant, admits to swapping pirated Sony PlayStation games with his friends because he thinks at $80 a pop, "they're not worth buying". He and his mates feel the same way about DVD. The only reason they don't crack and trade them is because "it's too hard: DVDs take up heaps of gig (gigabytes of hard drive space)".
Despite the fact that he's a musician himself, distributing his wares to the world via MP3, Jeff laughs when asked about any moral reservations he might have about his hobby. With conscience a non-starter, it seems bandwidth and disc space are the only limitations on wholesale file-swapping anarchy.
Frank Arrigo, business development manager of Microsoft's Windows Media Technologies division, is comforted by these practical inconveniences of file transfer. "Sure (piracy) is happening and people are having a bit of fun with it, but is it a mass consumer wave? I don't think so. It's still really hard for an average person to find an MP3 file on the Web. It's not a mainstream phenomenon," he says.
Arrigo plays down the popularity of Napster and even MP3 as a format (MP3 is still the most searched-for term on the Internet), and focuses attention on Microsoft's digital rights management strategies. He's excited about limitations embedded in Windows Media files: encrypted information which allows a song, for instance, to be downloaded, but only played a finite number of times.
Given the free-ranging nature of MP3, people like Louise and Jeff won't share his excitement.
Lawyer Miriam Stiel, who acts on behalf of Sony Computer Entertainment, is more concerned about changing kids' attitudes to information piracy. In the past year, her firm has overseen 700 investigations into the supply of pirated PlayStation games and instituted 60 civil proceedings in the Federal Court against individuals and businesses accused of either importing or burning CD copies of games.
Stiel sees high-profile legal action like Metallica's suit against Napster in May as crucial market education. "Many young people don't realise they are in fact breaking the law when they engage in piracy, so intellectual property holders have to take what action they can to protect their rights, even if it's only as an example for others," she says.
Alas, the Metallica example proved to be a mixed blessing for artists' rights. Yes, their complaint was upheld in court, to the (temporary) inconvenience of more than 300,000 Napster users. But the rock band, and the multinational record companies, are now seen as greedy dinosaurs who stubbornly refuse to wake up to the demands of the modern music consumer.
Chris Gilbey, author of MP3 and the Infinite Digital Jukebox, suggests that recent attempts by major record companies to sell music online are a step in the wrong direction if they want to gain the trust of disenchanted music lovers.
"Consumers want to be honest," he says, "but they don't want to be ripped off. If you look at the analysis of what record companies are charging for downloads in the US against what they get in net revenues from manufacturing and distributing the same track, you will find that they are seriously profiteering at present.
"This is not a model that is going to impress the consumer, and as a result you can expect them to feel that they have a right to punish the rip-off artist in the equation, regardless of whether this is morally right or not."
The fact that the corporations are now attempting to re-secure a level of control that they lost when the audio cassette was invented is hardly likely to make kids want to play their way.
Many US observers see the Recording Industry Association of America's intransigence as a deliberate bid to hijack the Internet altogether, to turn it into a corporate-owned and -operated shopping mall. Is it any wonder young people prefer to grab their goods from the back of a truck?
"What we need to do is to make it so easy for consumers to get hold of their music that they don't bother downloading illegally," says Sam King of MP3.com.au. "Encompassed in that responsibility is making music available at the right price."
But the right price is a relative concept. And according to Gene Kan, one of the three people behind the Gnutella software portal (www.gnutella.wego.com), it's not going to be determined by the RIAA.
"What we're seeing is kids defining the value of the art to what they think is right," he says. "If free is right for them, then I guess that's what it's going to be.
"Information-sharing technologies are only going to improve. If music distributors think they are in trouble now, they should think about what's just over the horizon. This is the rule: play The Internet Way, or die."
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald