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Editorial by Gene Pitts
Owner and editor of the audiophile voice.ETC.
I have to apologize. This issue is late but it is for reasons beyond my control. I have discussed this with many people in the industry, and I wish to take this opportunity to thank many of you, out here in public, for your warm kindnesses. I have tried to be gracious to all in my responses, but in case I have missed out saying "thank you" to some friend, then be pleased to accept it here. For those of you who don’t know, I'd rather not have to go through all that stuff again, so please....
Cake and Eat It, Too?
If you are a regular reader of this magazine or, better, have been reading the music or computer trade press over the past year, you will know about Napster, Metallica, and a heavy-duty court case concerning the sharing of music files via the Internet. Napster lost, badly, and is now owned (!) by a record company and run by a former record company executive. A lot of money was at stake, and indeed still is, but more important I think was the principle of what a private citizen could do with something he bought. I still keep thinking about whether it is legal for me to let my wife (see above) listen to a CD I bought. And whether it was legal for me to make a one-off dub from several CDs, including e.g. Eric Clapton's "Tears In Heaven," to run in "continuous play mode" in a Memorial Home.
There have also been reports that Sony Music, AOL Time Warner, EMI, Bertelsmann, et al. have tried out various forms of subscription-based music distribution or sale via the Web or the Internet. Some of these have been very short lived, for proof-of-performance purposes, it appears to me, while others seem to be fairly deliberate moves into such modes of music distribution.
One of the latest head-spinners in news about "A Little 'Net Music" was a story in The New York Times for Oct. 22 about a Justice Department inquiry into whether the recording industry is trying to illegally dominate such distribution of music by not licensing their catalogs to distributors competing with them on the 'Net. At stake here is the overhead money, the huge amount saved from not having to press the CD at some plant, put it into a jewelbox (Oxymoron Alert!), print and insert a booklet, and ship the whole thing all over the place. (Never mind that the ratio of manufacture and distribution to final price is much lower for CD than it was for LP.)
The article quotes at some length Jonathan Potter, who is director of the Digital Media Assn., a trade group of online-music start-ups: "In the traditional marketplace, wholesalers can't control what retailers charge. Suddenly, in the digital world, the record companies want the exclusive right to control how many copies are made, the technology, the price — the entire consumer experience." It's an interesting argument; is it price-fixing and monopolistic if the copyrighted piece of music can be bought at only one price and from one seller? However, I myself am more interested in whether I can play the music for others. And I cannot see any essential difference, for the purposes of this discussion, between the experience of two people in the same listening room, and their experience of the same piece of music played later on at the end of an e-mail or Internet exchange. Clearly the recording industry's lawyers can. It's not that there shouldn't be copyrights, but that their enforcement shouldn't violate the sanctity of the home.
A perhaps unrelated story in the Times the next day described "the latest skirmish between code breakers and digital copyright holders" when an anonymous programmer, using the nom d'Hack "Beale Screamer," published software named FreeMe that disables Microsoft technology intended to provide security for copyrighted music by, for example, not allowing copying to an MP3 player or the burning a CD-ROM (see above). For his part, Beale published with his software a criticism of the Digital Millennium Copyright Law (DMCA). saying that the publication of FreeMe was an "act of civil disobedience," apparently in the tradition of Howard Beale, a character in the movie "Network," who uttered the immortal (that's with a T, thank you!) line: "I'm mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore."
Mad or not, neo-Beale may be in for a up to a $1 million fine 'cause that's the potential penalty for such things under the DMCA. It just might be, too, that level of fine was what Prof. Ed Felton was thinking about when he was so cautious about telling the recording industry that their current "watermarking" anti-copy code could be removed without leaving "audible fingerprints." Some are claiming that Felton’s group never did the deed 'cause he didn't tell 'em how they did it. But he didn't have to if he didn't want to receive the challenge prize money; besides $10,000 split between a dozen or so researchers in Felton's group doesn't make honor worth very much.
