Children of the Napster revolution - Tanner

Telecom Asia, March, 2003 by John C. Tanner

As a fan of both music and technology, I've found the current legal battle between the record industry and file-sharing outfits such as KaZaa, Grokster and the late great Napster both fascinating and frustrating--fascinating because of the paradigm-shattering opportunity that file-sharing services bring to the table, and frustrating because the RIAA seems to be winning.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of copyright protection, and the growing popularity of P2P file-sharing software raises some legitimate issues that need to be debated. But the RIAA's apparent desperation has been leading to legislation proposals that range anywhere from poorly thought-out to criminally negligent.

In January, for example, RIAA chief Hilary Rosen's last act before stepping down was to propose legislation in the US and Europe that would hold ISPs responsible for any MP3 swapping their customers might be dabbling in. The RIAA sent a similar message to enterprise CEOs last October, warning them that their employees could get the company in trouble by downloading MP3s at work. Politicians on the RIAA lobby list have come up with their own ideas--like giving record companies the legal right to secretly hack hard drives.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the P2P file-sharing debate, however, is that there's far more at stake than a 9% drop in record sales whose correlation with MP3 swapping is at best tenuous. Let's be honest here--record companies have been shouting "home taping is killing music" since cassette recorders were integrated into home stereos. Between cassettes and MP3s, we had the DAT scare, after which the music industry noticeably failed to collapse.

Of course, cassette tapes and DAT lacked the one thing that MP3s don't--an easily accessible worldwide distribution system that can be used anonymously with a little know-how and effort.

Indeed, part of the RIAA's current panic attack is the genuine (and valid) fear that record companies will be made irrelevant. There's the question of billing, of course, so that artists can collect royalties, but last month, the RIAA and the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) announced GRID, a bar code that will allow record companies to track online music sales. Give the file-swappers enough time and they'll be able to use this for their own ends as well.

Another emerging problem is the conflict of interest between owning both infrastructure and content. Music downloads are a godsend for AOL Time Warner's broadband division, for example, who need such content to entertain its customers--but this is at odds with the company's music arm, Warner Brothers Records, which doesn't want MP3 downloads eating into its CD sales. Sony faces the same dilemma, with the additional complication that it also makes electronics. As Wired noted last month, Sony--the company that invented the Walkman and the Discman--should have invented the iPod, but couldn't because it would give pirates a practical use for all the music they were stealing from Sony Music, as well as the incentive to steal more.

Steal this business model

But the real issue isn't what users are downloading--it's the way they're doing it.

P2P software is the closest realization we've had to date of the destruction of the top-down communications paradigm that the Internet has always promised to bring. Thanks to digital cameras, camcorders, and applications like Flash, Photoshop and Peak, creative end-users are already making multimedia content that, every so often, enjoy brief popularity among Net users. P2P takes it to the next level.

No wonder the RIAA is having a cow. And no wonder government politicians are taking them seriously--most governments in the world have put a lot of effort into keeping Internet content under some level of regulation. Consider this: activist hacker group Hacktivismo has been working on stealth software like CameraShy and Six/Four that are specially designed for use in countries where the Internet is tightly policed. CameraShy is a steganography program that allows files to be hidden in JPEGs, while Six/Four is a protocol that combines P2P file sharing and VPN to allow users to set up anonymous P2P networks.

Now THAT is revolutionary. Or not--giving people tools is no guarantee that they'll use them. On the other hand, tools can't be uninvented. No matter how successful the RIAA is in its quest for a society where everybody pays, the file-swappers will always be there. The question is whether the industry follows the demand or tries to force the consumers to do it their way.