From 2000: Napster, Metallica, and the Age of Downloading
Our Summer 2K issue had a lot to say about the coming digital revolution
“The broader digital-music boom will inevitably force the music business to migrate to new business models, and the Napster threat will only hasten such solutions.” —Steven Levy, Newsweek
Originally published in URB issue 76, July/August 2000
The Fuss About Napster
by Raymond Leon Roker
Oh, the fuss about Napster (www.napster.com). Dr. Dre and Metallica, along with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), are in a tizzy over a program that does little more than take the private music exchange between friends to new heights. Well, sort of. If you’re catching up, Napster is a free downloadable application that links its worldwide users and facilitates the archiving, playing, and sharing of MP3s and CD tracks online. It’s a network of millions of users that open their music collections to the world. And, as the RIAA contends, it is "contributory and vicarious" copyright infringement.
Anytime you make a copy of an artist’s CD or MP3 for a friend, you’re technically committing a crime. Even DJs are “breaking the law” by act of unauthorized broadcasting. This has never been a real issue and was always little more than legal protection against outrageous abuses. But according to lawyers for the music industry, Napster may be the abuse they’ve feared but could never imagine until recently.
Napster says it’s only providing the file-sharing software that links people’s music archives. The actual act of downloading (or uploading) is the real crime (which is why Dre and Metallica’s lawsuits loosely target individuals instead of Napster themselves). Even AOL users can easily form chat rooms dedicated to trading music online. So, what's the big deal if this simple act of sharing music has been going on since recording devices have been in the home? Because Napster is the ”killer app(lication).” In other words, Napster allows this practice to occur so easily and prolifically that it’s changed how we may come to view music ownership, shifting the paradigm yet again.
The hidden genie that Napster was is now out of the proverbial bottle. If you’re online, your passion for listening to your favorite songs whenever you want has been anointed. And for free. Imagine all the songs you could listen to in a day as your soundtrack for the routine of work, driving, sex, or whatever is downloadable at the click of a mouse (and a 56K or better connection). It’ll be almost impossible to curb this yearning for music on demand now that the technology is available.
As a music media professional, I can concede the industry’s perspective on ownership. Still, I could never see myself buying XTC’s Drums and Wires album to own a copy of “Making Plans for Nigel” (downloaded last week, thank you) or “The Best of Yarbrough & Peoples” to own “Don’t Stop the Music.” If music brings you joy and fulfillment, then it’s unrealistic to expect regulations to curb something that provides instant gratification, which is what the Web is all about, many argue. Anybody on Napster can attest to the addiction that soon occurs. It’s like a personal jukebox dialed to your every whim. A global house party where songs are shared and (almost) everybody’s happy.
Whatever happens with Napster, the code has been broken again in the new environment of instant accessibility. We’re forced to look at even the most basic ideas, spurred by new ways of interacting, and question a new set of rules. Regardless of where things fall legally, the idea will remain part of information technology’s changing fabric.
Music In the Age of Digital Reproduction
By Heath K. Hignight
May 2000 was a bad month for the MP3 cause. Until then, Napster and Mp3.com had achieved a holding position with their approach to disseminating music in the hotly contested Internet realm. However, a series of events involving both entities proved to be decisive victories for the old guard of the music industry: the major labels and the RIAA.
First up were the Metallica shenanigans: Lars Ulrich appeared on the doorstep of San Mateo-based Napster with a massive printed list of fans who had illegally traded Metallica MP3S using the Napster software. It was a calculated photo-op that attempted to place a major metal band and its industry allies as helpless victims. The ploy worked, and Napster went on the retreat, having also lost their bid to throw out the copyright-infringement case filed against them by the RIAA. Despite their "safe harbor" defense, based on a portion of the recent Digital Millennium Copyright Act stating that ISPS aren't liable for criminal acts committed through their information conduits, Napster is now on the legal run.
The bigger news, however, was at pioneer Mp3.com. Their copyright-infringement problems arose regarding the My.mp3.com service and the free software Beam It, which reads a user's CD and verifies ownership, then allows the user to tap into My.mp3.com's file for that CD from any machine in the world when they access their private Mp3.com account. Mp3.com argued that this remote access was an extension of the original CD purchase, says Mp3.com CEO Mark Robertson.
"Until the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, consumers did not have the right to record CDs they owned onto tapes for personal listening. Now that issue raises its head again in the digital age. My.mp3.com lets consumers who already own a CD listen to it in a digital, Net-based CD player. It may be a right that requires some legal wrangling to secure, but we think it's important. Music buyers should be able to take their CD collection into the digital age and not be forced to replace it as they did with the cassette-to-CD migration."
But New York district judge Jed Rakoff sided with the RIAA and the five major record labels indicating that ownership of a CD did not include such remote access. My.mp3.com offered to pull all of its major label content from that service.
However, what is at stake here is a problem that many other technology areas are negotiating: What constitutes ownership in the digital domain? The computer software industry continues to work through these issues, having developed mechanisms such as upselling and shareware to naturally and (arguably) effectively maintain a measure of organized cash flow while allowing users to use the software efficiently. This area is particularly difficult regarding the entertainment industry, which is inherently based in the luxury realm. If you have the spare scratch, why not buy that fifth single from Britney Spears' album?
The recording industry giants know that to keep you spending, they must convince you that you need the latest CD they're hocking and can't live without it. Thus, the portability of music, the power to take music in digital formats and access it without the physical CD, threatens the consumer's need for it. At least, this seems to be what the industry fears.
Insofar as they're right, the industry ignores that these issues have often been wrangled over. In a 1936 essay titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," philosopher Walter Benjamin used the emerging medium of film to describe why people in the high arts, such as photography and painting, were reacting so violently to the mass distribution of movies for everyone and in so doing, laid the precedent for understanding the problems between the recording industry and groups like Mp3.com and Napster. "By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence," states Benjamin. It is the "liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage," he continues. That sounds remarkably close to Metallica's (and the RIAA's) romantic notion of copyright infringement: If people make copies of our music without our permission, it is no longer valid because the artist can't control its presence in the market.
Ultimately, the film industry eclipsed photography in much the same way photography eclipsed painting: yet each medium today occupies a unique and privileged space in the creative community. Artists and photographers are no longer starving today than 50 or 100 years ago; they starved along with most good musicians. What is at issue here is the portability of music and the concept of ownership. When dealing with a physically intangible art form like music and delivery through a physically intangible medium like the Internet (which, in theory, is a perfectly matched system), the focus on the physical music holder (e.g., CD) is just a reflection of an inability to deal with musical content in a non-physical form.
What's at stake with MP3S is not the matter of who gets paid when, but instead, who gains rights when money changes hands. As Benjamin suggested some 64 years ago, the original becomes devalued in the wake of multiple copies floating around. Still, history has proven that this devaluation is a temporary situation that music and art easily overcome.