MP3

Metallica's point of view on the Napster issue, expressed on their web site.

The music business is in the midst of legal battles instigated by MP3. Dave Shapton argues that these problems are partly due to misconceptions about the technology and its consequences for the distribution of music.

The more I hear about copyright owners threatening action against MP3 users, the more I think they simply don't get it. There's something profoundly disturbing about the spectacle of Metallica dumping computer listings of 30,000 alleged copyright infringers on the front steps of the Napster headquarters. And Metallica shouldn't be surprised if there's a massive backlash against them. Having said that, I understand why they've done it and I certainly don't think they've been stupid: just badly advised.

I've taken an inordinate amount of column space already on this, even to the extent of missing coverage of important stuff that ought to have been here. But we're in the midst of a legal battle verging on chaos, instigated by a recently emerged technology that affects music users now and for the foreseeable future (that means the next month or two!).

Part of the reason we're in this position is because not only is MP3 a transitional technology, but it is only half understood by the people it most affects. I'm sorry if that sounds condescending, and it's not meant to be, but the fact is that the mechanisms and protocols that make up the Internet are not fully understood by most people. That's good because 'enabling technologies' have the best chance of success if they are transparent to the user. How many people actually know how a fridge works? And who cares? However, because the Internet is so powerful, and so pervasive, we need to at least understand the underlying nature of it if we are to preserve certain of our fundamental rights, such as privacy, and derivative rights, such as the right to control how our music is used.

Digital Representation

Internet radio — streaming real‑time news and music from around the world.

The nature of the Internet is that it is digital and it is connected. It wasn't the Internet that created 'cyberspace': it was the analogue‑to‑digital converter. It's now possible to represent significant portions of our everyday existence digitally — especially those areas concerned with sound and vision. Even in difficult areas, like digital cinema, digital representation of an image at film‑like resolutions has become a reality. There's an important difference between analogue and digital representations of real life. Analogue reproductions can't exist independent of their media. Analogue images exist on film, where chemical patterns actually look like the phenomena they represent. To 'decode' analogue film you shine a light through it! The same kind of thing is true of audio recordings. Vinyl records can be decoded with a needle. Tape needs a tape head which demands some precision and, however demanding the mechanical engineering, the magnetic patterns on the tape ebb and flow in a close approximation to the original sound wave.

Digital representations, on the other hand, don't look like anything. The meaning of a digital recording can only be extracted if you understand the protocols and values used to encode the material. The number seven doesn't look like anything, except a seven. It certainly doesn't look like seven things. To understand what it represents, we have to understand what it means.

Anything can be a digital representation, provided there's a suitable protocol for interpreting it. Think of a stone wall between two fields in the Yorkshire Dales. Now imagine your favourite few seconds of music, digitised into a binary representation of it. We're going to divide the stone wall into regular segments and have one side represent ones and the other zeros. Now all we have to do is plant acorns to symbolise the ones and zeros. Wait fifty years. Take a satellite photograph and scan it into a computer. Superimpose the picture on a grid of the appropriate scale and mark up where you think the ones and zeros are. Process your data and clock it out through a digital‑to‑analogue converter. What you can hear is music. What everyone else can see is just a clump of trees.

Here's a question: where exactly is the 'file'? Is it on the ground or is it in your photograph? If the digitally encoded, arboreally represented, music is copyright, should you be prevented from photographing it? Or merely from decoding it? (Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to plant acorns — just in case). Or is it OK to decode it, but not to listen to it?

Contradictions

Staying with this line of thinking — although not obviously so — let's look at where we might be with the Internet in a few years' time. Two seemingly contradictory trends are apparent at the moment. One is towards greater and greater local storage capacity. You can get 30Gb hard drives for as little as £130 if you know where to look. And you know how out‑of‑date that will look in a year's time. The other trend is towards higher bandwidth connections to and within the Internet. You could argue that we'll need this kind of wide‑pipe connection to fill up our ever‑growing local storage with downloaded media. You could also suppose that if connections are fast enough then there's no point in bothering to download at all. If you can access remote media across the Net as fast as you can from a local drive, then you wouldn't even care where your data had come from. More to the point, you might not know where your data had come from.

Sooner or later, the Internet is going to become one unified filespace. Data, storage, computer programs and computer processing will become totally distributed. Already, it's hard to tell sometimes whether a program is excecuting in your browser or on a server somewhere. This ambiguity can only increase. It's probably a good thing because it will enable you to edit audio and video from a browser running on an Internet Appliance, which could be a mobile phone, PDA (personal digital assistant) or a 'web pad'. If you put a media‑aware operating system such as BeOS on an Internet Appliance then there's no reason why you shouldn't run an editing session on material that is somewhere else completely. You don't need to be anywhere near the data representing the media, as long as you get to see and hear the results of your actions.

Now, when it is no longer apparent, or relevant, that our music is local to us or just 'somewhere' on the Internet, there is an interesting issue that the legal people will have to address: if it's OK to buy a CD and share it with your friends, then what's the difference between this and sharing a file that you've paid for. If there's enough bandwidth for you to play a file from your friend's computer without downloading it, then why wouldn't you? And more to the point, why shouldn't you?

Copy Right?

I won't take any more valuable space to reiterate my view that copyright is good, but only where it can be realistically enforced. What I will say is that in little more than five years' time the chances are that we will all have free, unmetered access to the Internet. We will all have something like a Terabyte of storage on our computers (that's 1000 Gigabytes, 1538 CDs worth of uncompressed music or over two hundred thousand MP3 tracks). I don't think I'd ever need more music than that. I'd never have time to listen to it. How would it get there in the first place? There will be Internet agents (automatic software programs) that will track down music that we don't have yet. It will happen in the background and will be completely free. Already I have heard about people who have digitised their entire CD collection, and invited their friends round (with a spare hard disk) to copy the whole lot. I'm beginning to think that the only realistic answer to this is blanket licensing, of which more next month.