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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The legal crackdown hasn't squelched MP3 trading -- it's just made it more of a pain. But the music industry would still rather fight than give its online customers what they want.
Jul 30, 2002 | The fight against online music piracy entered the realm of the bizarre last Thursday, when Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., proposed giving the recording industry sweeping new powers to do what, for the rest of us, would be illegal: hacking computer networks.
Berman's bill, the Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act, allows record companies to respond to the "theft" of copyrighted materials by "disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, [or] otherwise impairing" a peer-to-peer file-trading network. As long as record companies do these things to prevent the trading of their copyrighted works, they couldn't be prosecuted under computer crime statutes.
Nobody knows what specific attacks copyright owners would carry out, but the bill seems to allow companies to do what many "hackers" have been jailed for -- denial-of-service attacks, for example, that would prevent users from accessing a Web site or other online service. Berman's efforts are being championed by the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry's trade group. In a statement, Hilary Rosen, RIAA's CEO, called the measure an "innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy."
Because the bill has almost no chance of becoming law in the short term -- just a few weeks remain in the congressional session, and there is not yet any companion legislation in the Senate -- file traders and civil libertarians responded to its introduction with a bit of bemusement. For some, the bill is just more furious hand-waving from an industry that fears it's going under. "It's not that different from making it legal to break into someone's house to make sure they don't have any illegal Mickey Mouse posters on the wall," says Adam Fisk, a Gnutella developer who works on LimeWire, a popular file-trading software application.
The Berman bill could be seen as a new low for the industry -- further indication that it sees the fight against MP3s as its defining cause and will go to any length to pursue it, no matter how outrageous. During the last three years, the battle against file sharing has become the entertainment industry's version of the War on Drugs, an expensive, protracted, apparently ineffective and seemingly misguided battle against a contraband that many suggest does little harm. The labels' main strategy -- busting the biggest dealers in an attempt to strangle the supply of free MP3s, while offering few palatable solutions to stem the demand -- is a classic tactic from the War on Drugs book, and it has failed just as clearly. Despite the RIAA's recent settlement with AudioGalaxy -- in which the trading service agreed to make available only those songs that it had formal permission to list, an agreement that renders AudioGalaxy useless -- researchers believe that more people are trading music than ever before.
But the RIAA's latest moves -- the Berman bill as well as rumored legal action against individual file traders -- are nevertheless curious, because they come at a time when the industry ought to be declaring victory. Precisely measuring the traffic on peer-to-peer networks is difficult, but there is at least anecdotal evidence to show that trading services no longer offer the cornucopia they once did and, at the very least, are much more challenging to use than was true during Napster's heyday.
While it's still easy to download some of the music you want, finding all the music, these days, is near impossible. Downloading a whole album? Even on a fast connection, even if it's a popular album, even if you have tricks up your sleeve, you might have to spend as much as a half hour of your workday. Then there are the increasing, and increasingly annoying, concerns posed by the file-trading applications themselves: the adware, spyware, Trojan software, and even possible security holes.
If the industry were smart, it would seize this moment. Instead of trying to hack its customers, it would seduce them with a pitch that goes like this: Getting free music is a dodgy affair -- pay us a little bit, and we'll give you a Napster-like free-for-all. But the music business isn't doing that; instead, through its antiquated, complicated and allegedly anti-competitive licensing practices, the labels have given us subscription services that fall short of fun. Even the good ones lack many useful features -- like CD burning, or the ability to play your downloaded music on many machines, or to listen to as many songs as you like for your monthly fee -- that any online music fan needs. And that's a shame, because a good service, released now, could cash in big.
