There’s a war raging in our country right now. No, it’s not about who’s “soft on defense”, or who can marry who, or who knew what about the halftime show of “Super Bowl 34-D”. It’s a war with thousands, even millions, of skirmishes played out every day on computers across the land. Who are the combatants? On one side are the “producers” – on the other, the “consumers”. It’s an age-old question, really: how do you protect the rights of someone who creates “media” (a book, a painting, a picture, a song, or a movie) AND protect the rights of someone who purchases the media for their personal use? This war has raged for decades, but in today’s digital world the rules of engagement have changed and the stakes are higher. Let’s look at some history.

The first salvos were fired with the advent of the cassette tape recorder. Yes, I know there were reel-to-reel recorders before that, but you can’t conveniently use a reel-to-reel in your car or on your belt while jogging. Suddenly, people could record music from vinyl LPs onto cassettes. Let’s face it - although The Courts ruled that such recordings for personal use were not an infringement on the rights of the musicians or record companies, many people made cassette recordings of music that they themselves had not purchased. Although this certainly deprived the artist of compensation for their work, cassettes faded over time, were never as good quality as the original LP, and as we all know, a copy of a copy of a cassette was downright un-listenable. Plus, even if there was “record sharing”, the effects didn’t ripple very far, and didn’t significantly dent record company profits.

Next came Compact Discs (CDs), which contained music in digital form. Before the boom in personal computers, CDs were just small LP in terms of sharing music, so CDs weren’t produced with any anti-copy features. Early personal computers had the ability to play (and copy and store) digital music, but had nowhere near the memory storage needed to hold more than a handful of songs. That all changed with the development of digital compression technologies like MP3, falling costs of large amounts of disk storage space, and the growing popularity of CD recorders (or “burners”). CDs could then be copied, with virtually no loss of quality. There were attempts to create copy-protected CDs, which proved unpopular and ineffective. Still, the revenue loss was not substantial, as the “distribution chain” for copied music was still relatively small.

The birth of the web changed the battlefield again, although not dramatically at first, as transferring even a small 3 MB digital music file was a time-consuming proposition over a 28K or even a 56K modem. Broadband (cable modem, DSL and faster) internet connections cut download times dramatically. The record companies’ nightmare began in earnest with the development of peer-to-peer file sharing networks like the original Napster (reborn today as a pay-for-music site, but that’s another story), Kazaa, LimeWire, and the like. Theoretically, one person could buy a CD, rip the music onto their computer, and the rest of the digital world could download it for free.

Did this affect record company profits (and the livelihoods of musicians and artists)? You bet. Billions of dollars. Whole distribution chains thrown out of whack. This led, of course, to the court-ordered closing of the original Napster, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) going after music “sharers”, both big and small.

Why are file sharing networks so popular? Is downloading music from Kazaa “stealing”? Some thoughts on these questions, and the next battleground – movies – in next week’s installment.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski