Just thought the list might find this entertaining/frightening/elating.
After all this media metamorphosis, vinyl will be more valuable than ever.
Unless vinyl gets replaced by ultradurable nanotech buckythreads.
Paz,
ADario
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/yr/mo/biztech/articles/07net.html
Powerful Music Software Has Industry Worried
By AMY HARMON
When the local alternative rock station listed the 300 top songs of the
millennium in December, Adam Campbell, a freshman at the University of
Oregon, decided it would be nice to own the entire collection.
Two hours later, using the fast Internet connection in his dorm room and a
new online service called Napster, Mr. Campbell had retrieved 275 of the
tunes -- free. They sit nestled on his computer hard drive along with 800 or
so other songs he has accumulated the same way.
"That's three days of continuous music," he notes with pride.
The music industry is already disturbed about how easy it is to copy music
via the Internet without paying for it.
But in recent months Napster has greatly magnified the threat. Acting like a
music search engine, the software makes it easier to find and copy a far
wider array of music. It also makes it easier for individuals to offer their
own music collections to others.
Napster, created last year by a 19-year-old college dropout, has spread so
quickly among college students, traditionally the most avid consumers of
recorded music, that the resulting glut of digital traffic has overloaded
university networks. Dozens of campuses have banned students from using the
service -- not because of copyright issues but to protect their networks.
But Napster is by no means just a college fad. Every day, about a million
otherwise law-abiding adult citizens are demonstrating no compunction about
using the service to get free what they would have to pay for in a record
store. And their numbers are growing rapidly.
Last month, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit
against Napster, which is based in San Mateo, Calif., seeking damages and an
injunction that would effectively shut down the service. Napster argues that
it is not liable for music piracy because the service does not keep any of
the music files on its own servers. The company says that its software
simply allows people to share information. And many of the songs that are
traded have been authorized for copying by the copyright holders.
The recording industry says it has no plans to prosecute individual users of
Napster, though copyright experts say the industry would have a very strong
case. The "fair use" doctrine of copyright law gives consumers the right to
make copies of CD's they own for their personal use, and plenty of music
fans make tapes or create a duplicate CD for friends without punishment. But
Napster complicates matters because it makes copying possible at a much
greater order of magnitude.
Whatever the outcome of that case, the popular embrace of Napster has
sharpened fears among record industry executives and some artists that the
Internet will undermine the control of copyright holders over the
distribution of their music.
What is more, the case is being closely watched by television and movie
executives, who see it as a glimpse into the future of their industries.
While high-quality video files are currently too large to be sent quickly
over most Internet connections, high-speed -- or broadband -- services will
soon expose other media to the opportunities and threats posed by digital
distribution.
For several years, a technology known as MP3 has allowed computer users to
compress music into files that are close to CD quality yet small enough to
travel quickly over the Internet. But there has not been an easy way to find
such music and then make it available to others.
A growing number of people use free or inexpensive "ripping" software to
convert their CD's to MP3 format so they can trade music with friends or
listen to their own music on their computers. Partly because it is probably
illegal and partly because it requires some technical expertise, few take
the trouble to make those MP3 files available for others to download.
Napster essentially gives everyone who uses the software access to all the
MP3 files on one another's computers that they are willing to share.
Napster's own servers simply compile a giant, constantly updated index of
all the music available from its users. Users simply type in the song title
or name of the artist they are looking for, and Napster generates a list of
other users who already have it. (A search yesterday for Korn, Santana and
the Beatle's song "Hey Jude," for instance, each yielded more than 100
results). Clicking on one of the selections automatically copies the file
from one user's hard drive to the other's.
By linking thousands of PC's into a kind of pirates' cooperative, Napster
creates an enormous and continually expanding library of song titles from
which its users can pick and choose.
"Once I got Napster, it was just crazy," said Mr. Campbell, who had
previously sought MP3 files on Web sites or from friends by e-mail. "It's
much more efficient."
Napster's supporters argue that the music industry needs to adapt to the
digital world and must accept that it cannot continue making huge profits
from traditional retail sales.
"Who's to say that because the music business is structured the way it is
structured, that's the way it should always be structured?" said Stewart
Alsop, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who is considering investing
in the company recently formed by Napster's developers.
"If I believe the new model is a better way for artists to operate, that is
a moral justification for feeling good about investing in Napster," Mr.
Alsop said, "even though technically what they're doing is facilitating
illegal behavior."
The record industry counters that if copyrights are not protected on the
Internet, artists will have no incentive to create. Moreover, the Recording
Industry Association of America sees a crucial distinction between Napster
and previous copying technologies.
"There's a difference between you sharing a CD with a friend versus opening
up your entire CD collection to everybody in the world to take whatever they
want," said Carey Sherman, the industry association's senior executive vice
president and general counsel.
But within the music industry there is also growing recognition of a
cultural battle that cannot be won in the courts. If today's teenagers are
growing up with the perception that music is something that can be had free,
the industry fears, copyright laws will become effectively unenforceable.
"There's an incredible disconnect out there between what is normal behavior
in the physical world versus the online world," Mr. Sherman said. "There are
people who think nothing of downloading entire CD collections on Napster who
wouldn't dream of shoplifting from Tower Records. There's just a massive
education program that's needed here for people to understand what goes into
the creation of music."
But some Napster users argue that slashing CD prices might be a better
defense than lawsuits and consumer education efforts would be.
"Honestly, I don't think the record companies need the money." said Raquel
Poy, 18, a freshman at the State University of New York at Albany. She was
using Napster to download James Brown's "Play That Funky Music, White Boy"
during a telephone interview last week. "If I were to go out and buy a CD
every single time I wanted to listen to something, I would go completely
broke."
The industry recognizes that suing consumers for copyright violations would
be counterproductive, which is why the it takes aims at services like
Napster.
"One of the fastest ways to turn potential customers off is to say they're
all a bunch of thieves," said Pam Samuelson, a copyright law expert at the
University of California at Berkeley. "You start hating your customers and
your customers are going to start hating you back, and that doesn't bode
well for your ability to attract them to buy more stuff from you. It makes
them more inclined to infringe rather than buy."
Although Napster makes no money at this point, interested investors say
there is potentially significant value in the large base of music fans the
service has already attracted. For example, Napster could collect
subscription fees from its users or persuade record labels to use the
service as a marketing vehicle or it could become an e-commerce outlet for
CD's and other merchandise.
As a computer science student at Northeastern University in Boston last
year, Shawn Fanning conceived of Napster as a way to get his roommate to
stop complaining about how hard it was to find the MP3 files he was looking
for on the Internet. His solution was a cooperative model.
The Napster software, which is downloaded free from the service's Web site,
automates the whole process of cataloging, indexing and enabling the
transfer of music files, even though its own computers hold no music files.
Mr. Fanning, who was nicknamed Napster in junior high school because of his
hair, is trying to turn the service into a business, financed with money
from his uncle and other investors, including Eileen Richardson, a veteran
venture capitalist who is acting as the company's chief executive.
But even if Napster prevails in the association's lawsuit, its business
model is vague. Paradoxically, its potentially most valuable product would
be the data it aggregates on consumers' musical tastes and listening habits
-- a potential marketing gold mine for the very record industry that is
suing the company.
Ms. Richardson argues that Napster actually spurs CD sales by enabling users
to sample artists with whom they might not otherwise be familiar, often
resulting in the purchase of a CD.
Napster has declared a desire to work with the industry to promote new
artists, but that may not be probable when many record executives liken the
service to the getaway car at thousands of crime scenes.
The staff members at Napster's headquarters in San Mateo prefer to compare
the program to the early days of the VCR. When the movie industry tried to
prevent Sony from selling its Betamax machine because it could be used to
make illegal copies of videocassettes, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of
Sony, because the machine could be used for a legitimate purpose. In the
end, the spread of VCR's resulted in enormous extra profits for the movie
industry.
Certainly, a few of the MP3 files traded with Napster's assistance have the
blessing of their copyright holders. But the overwhelming majority of
Napster's users would appear to be acting illegally.
Technically, Napster is supposed to remove the accounts of those it knows to
be distributing copyrighted material. But the company argues that it is not
responsible for what its users do with its technology.
"Consumers are going to do what consumers are going to do," said Elizabeth
Brooks, the company's vice president for marketing.
Investors agree. Several high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firms
have expressed serious interest in the company.
For a variety of reasons, most Napster users say they simply do not believe
they are doing anything wrong.
Alfred Werner, 37, of Oxford, Conn., says he uses Napster to get digital
files of the records that he bought in the 1970's but can no longer play for
lack of a turntable. "I bought the right to listen to King Crimson 15 years
ago," Mr. Werner said. "I'm just making a digital copy of what I have in my
closet."
Jeff, a 43-year-old Napster user from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., asked that only
his first name be used because he knew that, say, listening to the
Grammy-winning Santana single, "Smooth" on MP3 instead of paying $5 for it
might be illegal.
"But how illegal is it, really?" wondered Jeff, who owns a small
office-cleaning business. "Is it illegal if you go three miles over the
speed limit? We used to have a road here and the speed limit was 55, and
that was crazy. There was never any traffic, and everybody went 70, and
finally they just changed the speed limit. So yeah, you're breaking the law,
but how big a law is it?"
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