The Sound of Money

Wendy M. Grossman SO NAPSTER is about to be back. With file-sharing. And a subscription fee. And a new file format. Are they *nuts*? Who wants new, secure NAP files instead of nice, open MP3s that you can handle any way you want?

Of course, the answer is they're not nuts, they're just under immense pressure from the music industry and therefore the courts to come up with a solution that helps the music industry (read: the Big Five labels) extend its control of physical distribution into the world of digital distribution.

But the music labels are finally launching their online services, PressPlay (http://www.pressplay.com), jointly owned by Sony and Universal, and MusicNet (http://www.musicnet.com), a joint venture of Real Networks, AOL Time-Warner, Bertelsmann, and Zomba. MusicNet is a wholesaler, so to subscribe you must do so via a retailer, to start with Real One; PressPlay, which operates the same way, is available through MP3.com, MSN, Roxio, and Yahoo!. Meantime, the Recording Industry Association of American (http://www.riaa.org) is still pursuing lawsuits against file-sharing services, most recently KaZaA, Grokster, and MusicCity (though these will not be as easily killed as Napster was).

As Wired News argues, for the pay services to succeed the free ones must be closed.

This is almost certainly true the way the for-pay services are presently designed. A professional service that made top-quality copies available of digital version of the entire back catalogue would be worth subscribing to - it would save a lot of time over the hit-and-miss downloads we're used to over, say, Gnutella (http://gnutella.wego.com).

But, of course, this isn't what the services are. For one thing, the whole catalogue isn't available. For another, the files you download are time-limited. The bottom tier of membership of PressPlay, for example, is supposed to give you 50 downloads a month. As long as you continue to subscribe to the service, your entire archive of past downloads will continue to function while you add to it. If you stop…well, that's one way of freeing up hard drive space. In other fields, this kind of racket would be called extortion. If the choice is between renting files and spending time to acquire free (or open) files, people will take the open files.

They - the entertainment industry - know this. That's why we're seeing such a multi-pronged attack: competing services, lawsuits, and industry hardware standards. Disney's attempted Security Systems Standards and Certification Act ( here) is probably dead now, but that doesn't mean they won't try again. Last year saw industry leaders such as IBM to embed copy protection into removable media and hard drives (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/23516.html). Throw in the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and similar initiatives in Europe, and then anyone who tries to crack any of that copy protection is a criminal.

Recently also, the music industry has begun experimenting with issuing CDs that have errors embedded in them so that although they play perfectly on a home audio system which has error correction built in they will not play successfully on a PC's CD-ROM drive. Trying stuff like this shows how little the music industry understands the audience it spends most of its time targeting: teenagers.

Yes, teenagers have CD players. But most of them like to listen to music at their computers, which are both work tools and entertainment devices, sometimes at the same time. They resent having this pattern interrupted. Arguably, having copy protection built into the hard drive and CD-ROM drive would mean they could play CDs again - but this doesn't seem to be where the industry is going. Instead, what the industry seems to want is to turn all intellectual property into pay-per-use and the Net into the kind of broadcast medium it knows how to control. This is sort of possible for at least one of the five biggest record companies, since AOL, one of the largest ISPs, owns Time-Warner.

The most frustrating part about watching the RIAA and Motion Picture Association of American (http://www.mpaa.org) attack file-sharing services is that so much of the usefulness of those services has nothing to do with eating into their CD or advertising revenues. People use Gnutella and the others to download new TV shows that haven't aired yet in their location, or to pick up a single song they liked in the movie they saw last night, or, just as commonly, to swap material that is wholly unavailable elsewhere. The best way for the industry to counteract this sort of infringement is to make everything they own available to everyone everywhere at low cost. But this isn't how they think - at the launch of MusicNet, Real Audio's representatives said flatly the service would only be available at first in North America.

PressPlay's terms and conditions state that not only are you not allowed to sign up for the service from outside North America, you're not even allowed to access or use it from there, as absurd as that seems to any Net user.

So, in exchange for losing all that was wonderful about Napster, what do we get? A bunch of places to rent Madonna and Britney Spears. As they say, FEH!

Previous Columns
Battle of the titans
By any other name
Creative Accounting
Dumber people can run Windows
2001 in review
Care in the community
Remembrance of postings past
BT's Stupid Patent Tricks
Preserving our freedoms
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.

Copyright on all articles published in the INQUIRER is hers.