Time to negotiate on tunes

For the past several years the music industry has waged an increasingly intense war against individuals who illegally download copyrighted music from the Internet. Both the process and the law are relatively simple. Several years ago a number of Web sites, the most famous of which was Napster, began to appear on the Net. These Web sites all used some form of file-sharing and indexing software that permitted individual users to upload and download music with relative ease. Thus, an individual could purchase a new CD, upload to one of the file-sharing sites, and, from then on anyone could download the tracks on that CD.

Thus, one purchase could provide music, in theory, for thousands or even millions of listeners. While this was a windfall for individuals, it meant potentially catastrophic losses for the music industry in lost sales. A long and difficult round of litigation eventually led to the defeat of Napster, but this did not end the music industry’s problems.

As most people who work with software and the Net can tell you, every time the law is used to stop something, a new technology is developed to find a way to do it, prompting new litigation. In the case of illegal downloads from the Internet, the new technology is Kazaa, a much more sophisticated file-sharing system than Napster, and one which, because of its international nature makes any form of copyright infringement litigation especially difficult.

The inability of the music industry to shut down file-sharing sites and prohibit the production and distribution of file-sharing software has led the music industry in the last year to turn its attention to stopping the illegal practice at the individual level. Last year, one of several new private enforcement groups began to track illegal downloading by university students in the United States and sent warning letters to universities that such downloading must be stopped immediately or that litigation against the universities would result. Most universities took these letters quite seriously and enacted new policies and began to enforce existing policies against illegal music downloading.

Recently, these enforcement efforts at the individual level took another new turn. Within the past few weeks, music industry groups sent out letters to Fortune 1000 corporations, not only asking them to curtail employee downloading at work sites for legal reasons, but also pointing out how much such downloading was costing corporations in lost employee productivity. It remains to be seen whether this latest effort will have much effect.

The problem in all of this is that the technology of file-sharing has reached a level of sophistication that, when combined with the problems of international law enforcement, it has become virtually impossible to enforce national copyright laws. Unless an international treaty could be negotiated which bound every nation in the world, it seems less and less likely that the music industry will prevail in its efforts to stop music piracy.

Perhaps, however, the newest approach by the industry has more promise. In situations where law is ineffective such as this one, the industry ought to think seriously about explaining why piracy is a bad idea. While there are many such reasons, two stand out.

First, if piracy continues to grow and industry losses mount, then the industry will be forced to build safeguards into CDs and other recording media which will make it impossible to copy CDs, even when such copying (as to one’s own computer) would be legal. Second, if ways are found to circumvent such copy protection devices, then eventually the music industry will fail and there simply won’t be the kinds of professional recordings which they produce. Perhaps it is time for the industry to talk with its customers and attempt to work out a compromise that everyone can live with. If they don’t then the music industry and music lovers may well all lose.