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T A B L E__T A L K

Is there a future for Unix in a market increasingly dominated by Microsoft? Discuss Unix past, present and future in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

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R E C E N T L Y

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
As Slate goes, so goes ... Slate
(03/19/98)

The bleeding edge
By Jenn Shreve
When it comes to creative Web marketing, tampon manufacturers lead the way
(03/18/98)

eMate never had a chance
By Dylan Tweney
Why did Apple consign a kooky little portable computer to an early death?
(03/17/98)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
R.I.P., Word -- but don't get out your handkerchiefs for "content"
(03/16/98)

The Minor league
By Tom McNichol
Can Halsey Minor's "user-driven" publishing empire, CNET, make him the Internet's Ted Turner?
(03/13/98)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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_______AS MP3 PIRATES CROSS SWORDS WITH THE RECORDING
_______INDUSTRY, THE DREAM OF NET-BASED MUSIC
_______DISTRIBUTION HANGS IN THE BALANCE.

BY ANDREW LEONARD | I didn't want to be a leecher. I was hot to join the wild, somewhat shady world of MP3 music trading, but leeching struck me as unsavory and downright parasitical. On the Net, a "leech site" encourages direct downloading of copyrighted musical recordings, pirated software or porn without requiring anything in return.

Leechers just take, they never give. Not for me, that life of one-way bloodsucking. Besides, most of the better stuff isn't available for nothing: On many sites, you have to upload a track of your own before you can start grabbing goodies.

So I became a pirate: I hit the shareware sites in search of tools to help me make my own unauthorized MP3 song -- my own digitally compressed version of a compact disc audio track.

First, I snagged a "data ripper." A data ripper is a program that allows you to copy CD audio files directly to a computer's hard drive. About 15 minutes after installing the program, I had successfully transferred the song "Karma Police" from Radiohead's "OK Computer" album. Unfortunately, the new file was a whopping 45 megabytes thick -- far too huge for easy uploading.

Enter MP3. "MP3" is shorthand for "MPEG Audio Layer-3" -- a handy compression technology perfected in Germany in the early 1990s. I ran my Radiohead file through an MP3 "encoder" program, and suddenly that 45-megabyte monster was a slim four-megabyte slice -- with CD sound quality virtually intact.

The rest was easy. I skulked over to a popular chat room where MP3 traders gather to announce the Net addresses and access passwords for fly-by-night MP3 sites. I found a likely suspect, zipped over and waited half an hour while "Karma Police" uploaded via my 28.8 modem. Then, hooting with cyberpunk glee, I downloaded a live Rage Against the Machine track called "Take Back the Power."

Then I sat back and waited for the knock on my door. What I had just done was flat-out illegal -- a flagrant violation of copyright. The music biz is not known for being shy about enforcing its rights. In January, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) took several MP3-site Webmasters to court. Individual music corporations like Geffen Records are also taking an aggressive stance.

So far, I seem to be safe. The RIAA and Geffen just might have bigger fish to fry. Even now, the recording industry loses far more money to pirates engaged in the wholesale bootlegging of actual CDs than it does to a few thousand MP3 traders on the Net. But the entertainment business is paying increasing attention -- and well it should.

My own experience demonstrates how easy it is to employ the Net to violate copyright. For years Net pundits have been predicting that the Internet will erode intellectual property rights; now, it's finally beginning to happen -- and in an industry with billions of dollars at stake. Music is now software, and the Internet is the new middleman on the block. Whether or not one considers this progress depends upon where you stand.

The defenders of the intellectual-property status quo fear nothing but trouble -- escalating techno-warfare and proliferating piracy. But some musical rebels sense that a cherished dream might be beginning to come true -- the dream that the Net can smash through the old-media bottlenecks of mass marketing and distribution and usher in a new age of creative prosperity.

N E X T_P A G E .|. Hollywood cracks down on the data rippers

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ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM MCCAULEY