VIEWPOINTS

Highway Robbery

by Jen Idziorek

If you were trying to increase your earnings, would you begin to sue your customers? To most, that does not sound like a winning strategy. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), however, has begun doing exactly that. They claim that millions of people are stealing from them, and that they deserve restitution. On the other hand, a court in Utah is concurrently trying five major record labels for conspiring to simultaneously raise the price of their CDs. Who is stealing from whom? A broke college kid downloading a couple of songs, or a billion dollar industry charging $18.99 for a CD?

File sharing has come a long way. Some can even remember using search engines to find personal web pages where random collections of songs, half with broken links, were posted. It was a staggering feat to amass huge libraries in those days. Then came Napster. The end-all, be-all of peer-to-peer trading, it was a behemoth that gathered us all in and put all the music we wanted right at our fingertips. It was loved and revered, and everyone and their mother garnered a ridiculous number of mp3s on their computers.

But alas, only the good die young. In 2002, the RIAA sued Napster and brought its empire crumbling down. Fortunately, by that time there were many programs to take its place. Aimster and Audiogalaxy were the next to rise and fall, but soon there were hundreds. Limewire, WinMX, Diet K, eDonkey2000, SoulSeek, and Kazaa have picked up where Napster left off, providing a medium through which individuals can trade files (including mp3s) online. They work better than Napster ever did (pardon the heresy) and most of them are legal. One can easily get online and download an entire CD within hours, sometimes before it is even released to the public.

At first glance, file sharing sounds fantastic--all the free music you want, downloaded right onto your computer. The problem lies in the fact that trading mp3s online is illegal. By obtaining copies of artists' songs without paying for them, they and their label are being robbed of the money due to them. Some music fans say that downloading music helps them to decide whether or not they want a CD, but others admit to flagrantly thieving mp3s. Besides, what incentive do we have to buy CDs if all the music is free and a simple search away? Technology has made it possible to record music files onto our computers, and to burn them on to CDs--how great is that?

The music industry likes to resist technology. It started off by suing radio stations for playing their music, then moved on to vigorously denouncing cassettes and CDs, and now is being dragged kicking and screaming into putting songs online for paid downloading.

Most recently, programs such as iTunes, MusicMatch and the "new" Napster are offering a limited selection, but so far it has not proved worth the hassle to pay monthly fees and suffer through extended downloads only to have access to a mere fraction of what can be found for free. Many artists have not given approval to their labels to allow their music to be downloaded, even if paid for first. Some of the new music sites, such as iTunes, only support one kind of mp3 player--the one their company makes; in this case, the iPod. This revolutionary white rectangle has already been found to be lacking: the life of its irreplaceable battery begins to wane after a year and a half, sometimes to less than one hour of power. Apple's response was to offer to replace the battery for $99--about a third the price of the machine to begin with--or to offer a $59 two-year warranty. How can the RIAA expect to win back its customers with alternatives like this?

March of 2003 began with the RIAA issuing warnings to large corporations, notifying them if their employees were sharing music over the company LAN. This was followed by a price hike for most CDs. In June it announced a newer, more aggressive way to deal with downloaders: suing them individually. By early September, it had issued lawsuits to 261 users, including a twelve-year-old girl, whose picture ended up on the cover of the New York Times. Expectedly, an enormous uproar ensued over the reported ability of the RIAA to collect $750-150,000 per song, even from those who did not download. The president of the RIAA, Cary Sherman, was even quoted as saying, "...you have to choose between your wish to be loved and your wish to survive," as if taking $2,000 from the family of a twelve-year-old music fan from the New York projects would alone perpetuate the music business. Around Christmas time, another 41 downloaders were served, this time including a 77-year-old woman who did not own a computer. It was becoming more and more apparent that the RIAA looked at people more as crooks than clients. Alienating your customers and at the same time increasing your prices has only shown to be good business for painters and tattoo artists- whose work, notably, is not available online for free.

There does seem to be light at the end of the tunnel. Who for, no one is yet sure. The U.S. Appeals Court recently ruled that the RIAA can no longer force internet service providers to give out the names of suspected downloaders, causing much relief among the populace, from casual samplers to hard-core file sharers. One would think that this might cause resurgence in downloading, but the fact is that the noticeable lapse expected when the suing began never really happened. Kazaa-ites continue to enjoy gratis tunes at the expense of the industry, lacking serious alternatives. Hopefully, this will compel the music labels to either renovate their online services or reduce CD prices. The impending lawsuit against five of the major record companies concerning a concerted price increase rolls on slowly, but will soon entitle millions of CD buyers in select states to refunds. One side has got to give-and only time will tell which.