The Man, in the person of Lars Ullrich of Metallica, is upset about people sending MP3 files over the internet. In case you've been on Mars recently, MP3 is a format for compressing music (eg, tracks from CDs) into smaller files that can easily be sent over the net and stored in portable devices. After the heavy metal anti-establishment, living on the edge, wild man had finished demanding that the US government ban MP3 exchange, he took legal action against Napster.
Napster is a service that enables people to publish music files on their computers, making them available to anyone with a Napster client. Your computer tells Napster's computer what you have available so that when someone else uses their Napster client to search for something, your file shows up on their screen. They can choose to download it or not.
Metallica "won". Napster was forced to delete the user names of the 335,000 users named by Metallica, leaving the miscreants no other choice than to log back in again with a new user name.
While it's possible that The Man might go after one or two individual users to make an example of them (even Metallica's lawyer says it would be "economically ridiculous" to go after users) it would only be a gesture.
There are Napster-like services springing up all over the place with Scour, Imesh and Gigabeat (to name but a few) coming on stream.
The battle raging over MP3 has a wider context, because MP3 is a proxy for all digital content.
This is why the assembled teams of expensive lawyers are taking the whole thing so seriously.
But what can they do? Even if they are successful in preventing students from swapping MP3 files via Napster, worse nightmares await. Gnutella, which unlike Napster has no central server to go after, already has more files on its network thanNapster. Freenet, which combines similar distributed file management with strong cryptography, is coming together.
Both of them implement a new kind of distributed system, far more interesting (and with far greater ramifi cations) than Napster. Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, has called Gnutella "a benevolent virus".
Of real significance is the fact that both Gnutella and Freenet search for information and then provide it without telling where it came from.
Gnutella software is both a client and a server - it's known as a servant, in fact, to distinguish it from both. It runs on someone's computer and communicates with a handful of other computers that pass information from one to another, which is why it is compared to a virus.
So that every request for information doesn't have to traverse the entire Gnutella universe, the servants maintain a simple cache: if you've asked for information about MP3s, for example, other servants will pass any MP3 information that they recieve on to you.
Freenet differs from Gnutella in that, as requests are satisfied, so the servants in the chain keep copies of the information (not just the "pointer" to it). This serves to spread data around the internet quickly and makes it effectively impossible to delete anything.
Data gravitates closer to the point at which it is being used, or goes away. Freenet also searches for and identifies data by cryptographic "hashes" of keywords rather than the keywords themselves.
So it's hard to find out what information is on a system or what anyone is looking for.
The music industry, meanwhile, is hoping that Secure Rights Management (SRM) technologies will catch on. The idea here is that instead of MP3, consumers might be persuaded to use an alternative format.
I can't see that there's much incentive to do this: why would a typical consumer buy music in a format that is restricted to their PC?
Think of it this way. If CDs couldn't be copied on to tapes to listen to in the gym, or duplicated so that you can put a copy in the car but leave the original safe at home, or ripped into MP3 to listen to on your laptop, then would you buy more or less of them?
Surely a great part of the utility of a CD (to me, anyway) is precisely that you can do things with it. The alternative to not being able to duplicate a CD for the car isn't buying another CD: it's listening to the radio instead.
It seems to me that more books, and magazines exist now than did before the invention of the photocopier, and more people make a living from the music industry since the invention of the phono graph. (Imagine how scary it must have seemed to a performing artist a hundred years ago: oh no, people will never go to concerts again!)
Perhaps, and it's only a suggestion, the content producers (whether bands, film makers, novelists or whatever) would be better off directly spending their money on exploring new business models than indirectly spending it (via their record company or publisher) on lawyers to defend the old ones.
For example: why do record companies exist? Obviously they sign up and then promote talent, but one key reason why musicians need record companies is that they have no other means of getting paid.
If, however, advances in micropayments and other technologies mean that artists can collect money directly from their audience then the record company is no longer part of the value network.
Should it turn out that fans won't buy music at all - even for micropayments - and that revenues for future artists are to come from concerts, sponsorship and merchandising, then this is just as bad for the record companies because they would be wholly redundant.
There is, frankly, no possibility of stopping the zero marginal cost of distribution of digital content over the net.
Should content producers (ie artists) be worried about this? I rather think not: artists may find in future they will have to make most of their money from concerts, sponsorship and merchandising , but they will still make it.
The people who should be worried are the content owners: their position in the value network is the one at risk. When it comes to MP3 vs. The Man, The Man hasn't got a prayer.
Web addresses
Gnutella
www.gnutella.wego.com
Napster
www.napster.com
Imesh
Scour
