Wash. governor on education, partisanship

"Information wants to be free because it has be-
come so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine," wrote Stewart Brand in his 1987 book The Media Lab. Brand's words are an apt description of the Napster phenomenon. As hip hop, oldies, opera, and everything in between zipped through the digital ether, the idea of paying for compact discs came to seem so...post-industrial.

COURTESY CHUBB FELLOWS LECTURE SERIES Governor Gary Locke of Washington addressed Yale students this week.

But the music industry, led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is doing its best to remind Internet users of the corollary Brand offered to his own maxim: "[Information] wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient."

In the wake of the RIAA's successful suit against Napster, which has all but destroyed the company, the music industry is preparing to introduce its own fee-based music download services, Pressplay and MusicNet. To support these services, the RIAA is launching new technical and legal offensives that aim to reassert music labels' control over the distribution and consumption of music.

"It is time to get coordinated and aggressive with the new round of [free music download] services," RIAA President Hilary Rosen wrote in an e-mail to Internet and music industry leaders three weeks ago. "The amount of music being downloaded is, as you know, reaching unprecedented levels. Since college started last week, Morpheus traffic was up to 19 million downloads per day. And that's just Morpheus. With the imminent launch of legitimate subscription services, we have to get our customers back."

THE MUSIC INDUSTRY BEGAN ITS TECHNICAL BAT-tle with freely distributable digital music over two years ago. In December 1998, the RIAA led the worldwide music industry in founding the Secure Digital Music Initiative. The SDMI was charged with creating a "secure" (i.e., uncopyable) alternative to the MP3 format. The initiative, however, foundered from the beginning. When an SDMI-sanctioned format was finally released last fall, the organization sponsored a "Hack SDMI" challenge that invited cryptanalysts to "attack the proposed technologies. Crack them." The contest ended in controversy, however, when the RIAA and the SDMI threatened to sue a Princeton professor who claimed to have successfully cracked the SDMI format.

Yet recently, the RIAA seems to have abandoned the efforts spearheaded by the SDMI, instead embracing several different technological approaches to fight digital
music traders.

One such approach is the "uncopyable CD," which can be played back through conventional CD players but cannot be "ripped" to MP3 format by computers. Although copy- protection giant Macrovision has been experimenting with such CDs for over a year, most efforts have failed. This fall, however, promotional copies of Michael Jackson's new single Rock Your World, mailed out by Sony, appeared to be uncopyable.

"When loaded into the CD drive, the disc spun continuously as though the drive was trying to access the [table of contents] of a blank or corrupted CDR," reported a correspondent for UK tech newsletter Need to Know who obtained a copy of the disc. "None of our stand-alone professional or domestic CD players had a problem with it," he said. If the production of uncopyable CDs spreads, listeners who buy such CDs will have to convert the music to an analog format before they can encode it as a digital file, a process that degrades the quality of the music.

At the same time, the RIAA also is pursuing much more aggressive tactics that would directly assault the computers of MP3-swapping Internet users. RIAA President Rosen has proposed unspecified "interdiction methods" that would interfere with existing free music download services. The public got a glimpse of what such methods might entail earlier this week when RIAA lobbyists proposed an amendment to the USA Act, the major antiterrorism bill authored in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. The RIAA proposed that section 815 of the bill (entitled "Deterrence and Prevention of Cyberterrorism") be modified to allow computer hacking that was "intended to impede or prevent the infringement of copyright in such work by wire or electronic communication; provided that the use of the work that the owner is intending to impede or prevent is an infringing use."

Capitol Hill aides anonymously told reporters that the RIAA's amendment was being referred to informally as the "license to virus" proposal, and the RIAA has since backed down from the specific language offered. The RIAA stands by the sentiment, however. Mitch Glazier, a former House aide who is senior vice president of government relations at the RIAA, told Wired News that he believes current federal computer law allows hacking by copyright owners. "We might try and block somebody," Glazier said. "If we know someone is operating a server, a pirated music facility, we could try to take measures to try and prevent them from uploading or trans-mitting pirated documents."

While the legality of such attacks remains untested, the fact that the likely targets
of any RIAA-sponsored hacking are poorly financed compared to the deep pocket-
ed music indus-
try means that the RIAA might successfully shut down or disrupt free music sites with little or no legal resistance.

IN ADDITION TO TECHNICAL ASSAULTS ON digital music exchange, the music industry is continuing to challenge music distribution services in court. After the copyright infringement suit against Napster effectively shuttered the music-swapping pioneer, the RIAA has shifted its sights to other online music download services.

On Wed., Oct. 3, the music and film industries filed a joint suit against the family of services that operate on the FastTrack network. FastTrack is the digital backbone for music-swapping sites KaZaA, MusicCity, and Grokster. In a recent study, digital entertainment research firm Webnoize estimated that in September alone Internet users traded 1.5 billion files through the FastTrack network. "FastTrack has pulled clear of competing systems to become the dominant player in post-Napster file sharing," Webnoize analyst Matt Bailey, who led the study, said.

The suit against the FastTrack companies alleges that they have created a "21st- century piratical bazaar where the unlawful exchange of protected materials takes place across the vast expanses of
the Internet."

But internal RIAA memos indicate that the case is a complex one, partly because, unlike Napster, the FastTrack services do not maintain any central list of files available on the network. "We have solid claims against FastTrack, MusicCity, and Grockster of secondary liability for copyright infringement. The claims are not as strong as those against Napster, but they are also not so remote as to be wishful," the RIAA memo read.

Some remain skeptical about the RIAA's suit, however. "Right now, they are just killing a nest of roaches," Ric Dube, a senior analyst with Webnoize, told reporters. "But there are always going to be roaches in the house. A bunch of smart kids are going to reverse-engineer this code, and they are going to build better versions of open-source FastTrack software. All the recording industry can do is shut down people trying to make businesses out of file trading."

TO SUCCEED, HOWEVER, THE MUSIC INDUSTRY DOES not have to wipe out all file sharing services or make it completely impossible to rip CDs. The music labels' ultimate goal, after all, is to drive Internet users to their fee-based online services. To do that, they must make free options just difficult enough to use that music listeners will opt for the convenience of a pay-to-play alternative.

The two main industry-backed services are Pressplay, jointly owned by Sony and Vivendi Universal and in collaboration with Microsoft, and MusicNet, jointly owned by RealNetworks, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI Group. Together, these services will distribute music by nearly all major recording artists via dozens of major websites, including Yahoo! and America Online.

But apparently a strong Internet and music industry pedigree does not guarantee success. This summer, the Department of Justice announced it was investigating possible anti-competitive practices by the two services, which were originally supposed to launch early this fall. And at European Union conference on music last weekend, European government officials admitted that they were wary about the new services. "There are several aspects [to Pressplay and MusicNet] that merit investigation to determine whether or not there are restrictions of competition," said a spokesman for EU competition commissioner Mario Monti.

And so the battle to control Internet music goes on. But while the RIAA targets online pirates and the government investigates industry heavyweights, the songs continue to zip back and forth. It seems that no matter what, the Napster generation will get its digital fix.

Graphic by George Weinberg and Zander Dryer.

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