The Digital Dilemma Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000) / Chapter Skim
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2 Music: Intellectual Property's Canary in the Digital Coal Mine
2 Music: Intellectual Property's Canary in the Digital Coal Mine
Pages 76-95
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From page 76... ...
Yet the problems facing the music industry will likely soon be found on the doorstep of other content industries. This chapter presents the developments in the music industry and reviews its early phases of coming to grips with digital information.
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From page 77... ...
First, files containing high-fidelity music can be made small enough that both storage and downloading are reasonable tasks. Digitized music on a standard CD requires about 10 megabytes per minute of music; with a format called MP3, that same information can be compressed so that it occupies about one-tenth as much space.2 As a result, music files currently require about 1 megabyte for each minute of music (or about 45 megabytes for a typical album)
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From page 78... ...
Lending libraries gave 4Rippers copy the digital data from the CD to the computer s hard drive, reading the CD as if it were a Very large' floppy disk. 50n college campuses, the use of digital music files has created sufficient levels of network congestion to cause some network administrators to put MP3 servers on their own subnet to minimize the disruption to the main campus network As reported by a briefer at the committees meeting on July 9, 1998~.
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From page 79... ...
Some suggest that the ability to download music will increase sales by providing easy purchase and delivery 24 hours a day, opening up new marketing opportunities and new niches. For example, the low overhead of electronic distribution may allow artists themselves to distribute free promotional recordings of individual live performances, while record companies continue to focus on more polished works for mass release.
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From page 80... ...
: "We think the best way to stop piracy is to make music so cheap it isn't worth copying" (Abate, 1998~.8 EMusic sells singles in digital form for 99 cents. But if those singles are in the form of MP3 files, they are unprotected nothing prevents the purchaser from passing a file on to others or posting it on a Web site (illegal though these actions may be)
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From page 81... ...
Where such private behavior is concerned, business models may offer a far more effective means of dealing with IP issues. Use Digital Content to Promote the Traditional Product Another business model approach sees free online distribution of music as a way to build the market for the traditional product.
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From page 82... ...
Give Away (Some) Digital Content and Focus on Auxiliary Markets A more unconventional approach takes the position that most digital content is so difficult to protect that a more sensible business model would treat it as if it were free (Dyson, 1995~: Chief among the new rules is that "content is free." While not all content will be free, the new economic dynamic will operate as if it were.
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From page 83... ...
But in other cases the existing business model and industry structure cannot be maintained, no matter how vigorous the legal or technical efforts. In such cases some form of adaptation and creative rethinking can be particularly effective; the business model responses noted above offer a few examples of that type of thinking.
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From page 84... ...
and those that are "fragile" (i.e., distorted by most modifications to a file, as for example compression using MP3~. One proposed plan is to embed both a robust and a fragile watermark in newly released CDs and then require that licensed portable players refuse to play digital music that has a robust watermark but lacks the fragile watermark.l5 The presence of the robust watermark indicates that the music is newly released, while the absence of the fragile watermark suggests that the music file is no longer in its original form (and hence may have been copied)
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From page 85... ...
to others who can modify the decrypted file to play on their machine. Some technical protection mechanisms attempt to provide additional security by narrowing as much as possible the window of opportunity during which the decrypted information is available.
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From page 86... ...
All mechanisms can be, eventually. Instead the key questions go back to the three fundamental factors: technology, business models, and the law.
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From page 87... ...
Any time content is valuable, some people will be motivated to find ways to break the protection mechanism, and some of them will be more than willing to share their techniques. For example, by the end of 1998 a program called a2b2wav that was available on the Web purportedly cracked the protection scheme then in use by both a2b and Liquid Audio, producing an unprotected file of the music in another audio format called WAV.
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From page 88... ...
Getting significant content protection machinery in place and widely distributed would require a concerted and coordinated effort, yet each of the players has its own goals and aims that may not necessarily align (see, for example, Hellweg, 1999~. A fifth difficulty is the inherent complexity of providing end-to-end protection within a general-purpose computer.
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From page 89... ...
A related opportunity arises with new technology: With portable players, a relatively recent development, there is not a major installed base requiring compatibility, offering the chance to set security measures in place near the outset of the new technology (as indeed the Rio player and others have agreed to do) .2~ The installed base problem here is more likely to arise from the need to be compatible with the existing MP3 format, widely and legally used by consumers to make personal copies of CDs they own and who are likely to want players capable of playing those files.
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From page 90... ...
As noted earlier, one of the fundamental changes brought about by the Web is the availability of an inexpensive publishing and distribution medium with worldwide reach. If composers and performers choose to take advantage of that medium, what is to be the role of traditional music publishers and distributors?
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From page 91... ...
The company plans to attract listeners who are willing to sample unknown recording artists by offering prizes such as backstage passes to concerts and visits to recording studios (Markoff, 1999~. 24The issue before the court concerned whether the Rio was a digital audio recording device subject to the terms of the AHRA (devices under the purview of the AHRA must prohibit unauthorized serial copying)
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From page 92... ...
Virtually all of the copying of MP3 files is done on computers, but (as noted) computers are not covered by the Audio Home Recording Act (because their ability to do digital recording is not "designed or marketed for the primary purpose of .
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From page 93... ...
. If MP3 wins out, putting the genie back in the bottle will be difficult, and we will all be engaged in an experiment to see what effect unrestricted digital distribution has on the music industry.27 If one of the more secure formats wins out, the industry character and structure will likely suffer far less upheaval.
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From page 94... ...
Electronic books are appearing, with several Web sites selling full-length books in digital form, while others offer reloadable book-sized portable display hardware.30 This development is made possible in part by the creation of more secure forms for the content, of the sort provided, for example, by Adobe's use of ContentGuard technology from Xerox, resulting in a more secure version of its popular PDF document format. With electronic publishing of books come many of the same issues concerning the role of the publisher: Various sites on the Web offer electronic publication of works, presenting an alternative to traditional pub 29At one time, of course, singles were a viable part of the music market (as 45 rpm records)
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From page 95... ...
The second lesson is that struggles over protecting intellectual property take many forms and reach into a variety of areas, including battles over technology, standards, industry structure, and business models. Keeping this in mind often makes it easier to decode the disparate agendas and strategies of the many players engaged in the struggle.
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