Dave Fass 5-31-00
Manifesto The Internet
It all started innocently enough. My high school friends and I would swap computer software. If one of us owned software which was deemed cool enough, he or she would trade the program with another member of the group for some other software gem. When new software came out that we decided that we needed to have, we usually split the cost and shared the program. We knew that what we did was technically considered software piracy, but we didn't care. We were just a bunch of ninth graders who wanted to play Doom. Who cares about a bunch of ninth grade software pirates, anyway? Maybe if someone would start producing software that would jive with the average teenager's budgetary constraints, we would've each bought our own copy of the programs, but the titles we wanted were usually at least $40; much more than we were prepared to spend on a few floppy disks or a CD-ROM (if you were lucky).
Then came the internet. When I got my first internet connection, I quickly realized that my friends and I weren't the only people swapping software. It was going on all over the world, and the library of titles was much larger than that offered by the local Software Etc. Once my friends and I were all on the net, we began trading URL's containing downloadable software rather than the software itself. I also began swapping software with other people across the country. There was actually a point in my life where I had all the software I wanted, and I was content with just going online to check my email. That was until MP3's came along.
For those of you who don't know, MP3 stands for MPEG Layer 3. It's a method of compression used mostly for music. The great thing about MP3's is that a track that would normally be an unwieldy 40 or so megabytes when converted to MP3 format is reduced to 5 or 6 megabytes and is now ready for easy distribution over the net. There is little or no loss of quality, and software to make, play, and edit MP3's is easily attainable on the internet. But what about record labels? Don't they find this new technology threatening to their grip on the music industry? Of course they do. The issue didn't really start popping up until recently though, when MP3 compression started offering near CD-quality sound. Artists and labels both started to take notice. Once musicians realize how cheap and easy it is to release an album on MP3 (record, encode, upload, repeat as necessary), there will be less need for record labels to put music out. Aside from advertising and promotion (which can also be done online to some extent), nearly everything a record label could do can be done online. No more signing over a large chunk of album sales; the artist gets it all (potentially, at least).
With so many people starting to take notice of MP3 music on the internet, it was only natural that someone would develop software that allowed people to get easier access to music they want in MP3 format. Enter Napster, the savior of poor, music-hungry college students and the bane of record labels. It's a quick free download from the Napster website and you're off, browsing collections of MP3's from all across the country. You see, Napster is a wonderful little program that collects a list of all the MP3's on all of its users' computers and makes them public for anyone who is signed on to take and listen to. That means now, if I have a hankering to listen to my favorite release by Johnny Cash, Elvis, or whoever, I can simply log on to Napster and have the song I want within minutes (dependent, of course, on whether somebody else has the MP3 first). This huge free library of music is mind blowing the first few times you browse it. Nearly any song by nearly artist is readily available for downloading. And even if your song isn't on the roster tonight, it might be tomorrow or the next day.
All this free music leads to one almost instant conclusion: no more need to buy CD's! If you can get any songs you want for free and they're as good as CD quality, why bother paying anywhere from $16 to $18 (!!!) for the CD? That's great until you realize one thing: owning MP3's that are of copyrighted music is considered copyright infringement and, therefore, a crime punishable by law. Which means those live Metallica MP3's are ok because they were recorded at a concert and are not copyrighted, but all those Beastie Boys tracks and the MP3 copy of the new Limp Bizkit album could theoretically get you into trouble. Now, it's not like there's some sort of MP3 police that come around and check your hard drive for illegal music files, but the chance that you might get caught is still there. Regardless, nearly anyone with a computer and an internet connection has at least one MP3 sitting around in their computer somewhere, and chances are that there's always someone out there with tons more MP3's than you've got, and it's for this reason that nobody is really cracking down on illegal MP3 owners.
Well, this is all great for us music consumers: we get to listen to our favorite tunes for free and we never have to leave the house to do it. But what about the musicians? Well, when it comes to musicians and MP3's, there are basically 3 types of opinion: anti-MP3, pro-MP3, and those who are undecided.
Most of the artists who are anti-MP3 are, not surprisingly, big selling artists on big labels. These are the kinds of bands that you see on MTV and whose albums go multi-platinum regardless of the quality. These artists, most recently Metallica and Dr. Dre say that MP3 is destroying the music industry. They say illegal MP3's reduce the desire for most people to buy their album, thereby reducing their profit. Metallica has even gone as far as to gather a list of some 30,000 Napster users who were caught transferring copyrighted Metallica songs. The band is now attempting to sue Napster and the 30,000 people on the list (i.e.. their fans) for "lost revenues" resulting from MP3 trading. This may not seem like the best way to get your fans to keep buying your albums and coming to your concerts, but Metallica does not look like they are about to back down.
Most pro-MP3 artists are not well known (with a few exceptions, such as Chuck D) and see MP3's as a way of getting their music out to a large audience without having to sign their soul over to a record company. Then there are those who straddle the line: they see MP3's potential for easy distribution and a more widespread audience, but at the same time they fear the blatant piracy that MP3's so often promote. Personally, I fall into the third category. I make music on the computer and have found that MP3's can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it's easy to email MP3's to a friend or to put on my website to let others hear, but there's always this fear that one day I'll hear one of my songs on the radio with someone else taking credit for it. My personal take on MP3's is that I use them as a try-before-you-buy type thing. If I download an MP3 and I really like it, I go to the store and shell out the $15 for the CD, if only out of respect for the artist. It's also nice to have the MP3 version of a song on my computer even though I have the CD. That way, if a friend wants to borrow the CD, I can either lend it to him or her without having to live without the music, or I can just email out the MP3 version.
Around the same time I was discovering the beauty of free downloadable music, I was also discovering the wonders of FTP, or File Transfer Protocol. Using some sort of FTP software allows computers to connect directly for the transferal of files, foregoing the nearly endless searching that you have to do on the internet to find pirated software and the like. Through various FTP servers I was able to accumulate a large amount of software (by this time, my interests had drifted from games toward more "professional" programs, such as Photoshop), music, and even movies (yes, the ones that you go and pay up to $8 to see in theaters). All illegally, of course, and all without so much as batting an eyelash. I never thought even once about what might happen if anyone knew what was stored on my hard drive and numerous CD-R's scattered around my bedroom.
One day, I came to a sobering realization while watching VH-1 news, of all things. There was a news report on about the first person ever to be tried solely for possession of copyrighted MP3's. The scary part of the whole thing is that the person standing trial was a second year college student. He had decided to start his own FTP server for MP3 trading and the campus computer services people eventually became suspicious because of the amount of bandwidth usage coming from his dorm. In an interview, he estimated how many MP3's he actually had to be about 500 or so. I was startled because that seemed like relatively few, considering I'd filled my hard drive numerous times, only to burn a few CD's worth of MP3's off and then fill it up again. I probably had well over a thousand MP3's, and other illegal things sitting on my computer as well. I became paranoid that the FBI would somehow find me and discover the mass quantities of illegal information I had on my computer's hard drive. For the first time in a very long time, my modem became silent. I ceased downloading MP3's and illegal software altogether and even went so far as to unplug my modem from the wall when I wasn't online. Shortly after this, my computer crashed and needed a new hard drive, bringing my era of information piracy to an end. I kept the CD-R's, but stayed away from any further illegal activities until just recently.
In the past year or two, with my musical taste changing, I found myself once again back online downloading MP3's. This time, however, I was on a T1 connection on a college campus, which made my 56k modem from home seem like nothing. I could download an album a night, sometimes a few if I could steal enough bandwidth. Time was barely a constraint anymore. Most things that I wanted to download would do so in as little as five minutes. I soon found myself eyeing FTP servers with beefy programs such as Bryce 3-D up for grabs. Needless to say, I am back to my old habits of taking what I want from FTP servers and Napster and for whatever reason, I no longer worry about the FBI barging into my house and taking me away to be incarcerated for software piracy or copyright violation. I no longer worry simply because, as long as I download in moderation, there will always be someone out there with loads more illegal stuff on their hard drive. For example, a friend of mine who runs an FTP server currently has a few gigabytes of just MP3's! Along with that, he has almost a hundred full software titles and about fifty movies that are free to download. I figure that if the government ever decides to really crack down of copyright violation and software piracy, they'll go after people like him rather than those like me who have a few CD's of random MP3's and a couple of unregistered software titles.
As long as the internet stays in its current state, users will remain relatively anonymous and it will be virtually impossible for the government, or anyone for that matter, to crack down on most violators of copyrights. Until music and software is made legally free for all to share, there will always be people like myself who choose to take it, whether for monetary reasons, or just by principle. As long as there is an internet, there will be information pirates.