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MUTINY ON THE NET | PAGE 2 OF 3
"There is no question about the Internet being a major challenge for us," says Steven D'Onofrio, director of anti-piracy operations at the RIAA. "Anyone that has a computer and modem can put up and take down recordings and distribute them at great speed to a vast audience." That doesn't mean that the industry plans to back down, however. As a spokesman for Geffen Records noted, "We have sent cease and desist letters in the past and we will continue to do so. We are going to protect our rights and our artists' rights." It won't be easy. D'Onofrio says the RIAA has several full-time staff members who spend their days surfing the Net in search of copyright criminals. But these cops have an unmanageably big beat to walk: There are at least three major sources of MP3 piracy. The first, and easiest to quash, is the publicly accessible Web sites that allow direct downloading of MP3 singles. In the second half of 1997, the effrontery of such "leech" sites had become increasingly brazen -- and that, according to veterans of the MP3 scene, helped provoke the January crackdown by the RIAA and Geffen. That campaign took out most of the biggest MP3 sites, say MP3 insiders -- although they note that a horde of much smaller, less popular sites have sprung up to fill the vacuum. But there's a second, significantly more underground locus of activity -- the world of MP3 "ftp" sites. Ftp software (file transfer protocol, a technology that far predates the Web) allows anyone with a computer and a modem to make files on their home computer accessible to the rest of the Net. Such sites may only be open to the public a few hours a day, or allow only a few simultaneous users; but there are thousands of them, with directories chock full of the latest MP3s. Shortly after the release of Madonna's first single from her latest album, one MP3 search engine returned a list of 63 different sites with the song. D'Onofrio says the RIAA has had little trouble cracking down on students in the United States who use free college accounts to run their ftp servers, and that he's even had success getting foreign-based Internet providers to shut down sites. But some MP3 fans are skeptical. "Right now many ftp sites that store thousands of songs for people to download at free will are located outside of the U.S.," says Josh Malin, Webmaster of the MP3 information site The Ministry of Sound. "The RIAA and individual bands are going to have a lot of trouble going after some guy running an ftp server in an Eastern European country that couldn't give a damn." "Future technology poses even more difficult problems for record companies," says Malin. "Right now the average home user has a 28.8/33.6 modem. When cable modems or ADSL are rolled out across the country, it will be easy for any regular home user to turn their own computer into an ftp server offering MP3 files at very fast speeds. Thousands of new servers could pop up daily, creating a nightmare for record companies. Even today, an ftp site can have its IP address reassigned and not be found again for weeks." Finally, there is the chat-room scene. MP3 trading in chat rooms may not approach the scale of ftp or Web site trading. But chat rooms are nonetheless remarkable for introducing cutting-edge delivery methods, and they're resilient in the face of punitive action. There are hundreds of different chat networks accessible from the Internet. Some of them, like the Internet Relay Chat network's "EFNet," boast hundreds of chat "channels" in which MP3 trading activity occurs. The most popular are inhabited by user-friendly "offerbots" -- automated programs that deliver MP3 singles in response to specific text commands. Offerbot-infested channels are operated by MP3 data-ripping gangs like the Calypso Production Society, a group of around 20 MP3 pirates who specialize in wholesale appropriation of popular compact discs into offerbot-accessible form. If reprisals are threatened, groups like the CPS can simply migrate to a new network or a new channel and continue their "ripping." N E X T_P A G E .|. Copyright police-state -- or musical utopia? |
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