Music
industry can't outwit online outlaws
By Patti Hartigan, Globe Staff,
5/31/2000
David Weekly wasn't amused earlier
this month when Napster, the digital music-sharing
service, ousted more than 300,000 users for illegally
trading songs by the band Metallica. The Arlington
native and Stanford University senior devised a
technical solution to get around the ban and posted
the instructions on his Web site. He estimates that 95
percent of the outlawed users were back on Napster
within days.
Weekly's quick fix is just one way
savvy computer users are circumventing attempts by the
entertainment industry to stop online piracy. So far,
most of the attention has been focused on Napster,
which is wildly popular on college campuses. But if
the music industry prevails in its lawsuits against
the San Mateo-based start-up, users could migrate to
other commercial online trading services, like iMesh
and Scour; they could also turn to underground
programs that don't rely on a central server and are
less vulnerable to litigation.
''Napster the company is irrelevant,
but Napster the concept will survive,'' says Weekly,
21. ''The toothpaste is out of the tube, and there's
nothing the music industry can do about it.''
Indeed, while artists like Metallica
are staging high-profile battles in the courts, young
computer whizzes and libertarians are quietly
developing subversive alternatives to Napster. In
March, entrepreneur Justin Frankel, 21, invented a
file-sharing tool called Gnutella and posted it on the
Net. Frankel and his partner, Tom Pepper, are founders
of Nullsoft, an Internet company now owned by America
Online; their bosses at AOL, which is in the process
of a merger with media giant Time-Warner, yanked the
program from the Web within hours. Nevertheless,
thousands of computer users downloaded the program
before it disappeared, and tens of thousands of people
are now using it to trade everything from music and
movies to software and pornography.
While Gnutella hasn't reached the
name-brand status of Napster, its users have a sort of
religious zeal about the program and are openly
dismissive of the music industry. ''Let them sue me,''
says Gene Kan, 23, an engineer in Redwood City,
Calif., who helps run a Gnutella Web site. ''Are they
also going to sue hundreds of thousands of other users
and then sue the successor to Gnutella? They might as
well give up.''
Meanwhile, a computer programmer in
London is developing a program that is even more
subversive than Gnutella. Called Freenet, the program
aims to enable users to trade digital information
anonymously over the Internet while making it
virtually impossible to trace such activity. As
conceived, Freenet would allow college students and
dissidents alike to trade files without fear of
retribution, but it would also provide a safe
information conduit for, say, terrorists and child
pornographers.
''Even if the American government
was dead set against Freenet, they could not shut down
this system,'' says Ian Clarke, the 23-year-old Irish
programmer who devised the program as his thesis
project at the University of Edinburgh. ''It was
designed to withstand attacks.''
Clarke uses the analogy of a party
to differentiate Freenet from other programs. With
Napster, all the guests tell the host everything they
know, and whenever anyone wants information, they go
directly to the host. With Gnutella, there is no
centralized host; guests must shout out requests for
information and hope that someone will share that
information. Everyone else at the party can see who
delivers the information.
Freenet, however, is more private.
When a guest wants information, he asks the person
standing next to him, who then passes the request
along in an ever-widening web. Eventually, the
information works its way back to the person who
requested it, but it's extremely difficult to
determine the source.
Clarke says about 30,000 people have
downloaded Freenet since he made it public late last
year. It doesn't yet have the avid fan base of Napster,
partly because it is harder to use and doesn't have a
built-in search mechanism yet.
But Napster allows only the sharing
of music files, while other programs enable users to
all kinds of files, including videos. A few days after
the movie ''Gladiator'' opened, for example, bootleg
copies were being traded online by those willing to
wait several hours for them to download.
''That is not freedom of speech;
that is thievery,'' says Jack Valenti, executive
director of the Motion Picture Association of America.
''Wherever one snake head arises, we will cut it
off,'' he adds. ''And if another one grows in its
place, we'll cut that one off, too.''
Executives in the recording industry
are echoing that battle rhetoric as well. In a speech
last week, Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. warned that
the music industry would fight technology with
technology, employing tools that make it possible to
track every Internet download and tag every file.
(Seagram is the parent company of Universal Music
Group.) ''We will take our fight to every territory,
in every court, in every venue, wherever our
fundamental rights are being assaulted or attacked,''
he said.
But that is easier said than done at
a time when computer wizards are continually cracking
encryption codes and inventing their own solutions to
the music distribution dilemma. Two days after Napster
banned Metallica fans, a group of programmers in the
United Kingdom announced Metallicster, a program
specifically designed to trade music by the heavy
metal group.
''The technology is out of the bag,
and anyone who wants to pirate music over the Internet
is going to be able to do it,'' concedes Howard King,
the Los Angeles lawyer who represents Metallica. ''But
we are going to set a legal precedent that will be
available to any other owner of intellectual
property.''
However symbolic, an unenforceable
court ruling may not have any effect on the general
public, especially a generation that was raised on the
Internet and the concept that all information must be
free. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software
Foundation, is a long-time proponent of that credo.
While he categorically believes that all software
should be free, he says he doesn't have any problem
with fees for music and other forms of entertainment,
since software is made to be used and music is made to
be appreciated. But he adds, ''Private occasional
redistribution [of music] must be lawful, because only
a police state with draconian laws can prevent it.''
Irish programmer Clarke is a
free-speech absolutist who makes no exceptions for
entertainment, child pornography, or terrorism. ''My
point of view is not held by most people,'' he says,
''but the technology has given me the ability to do
what I think is right without having to convince
anyone.''
In fact, if Freenet takes off,
technical wizards like Clarke certainly will have the
upper hand, making it nearly impossible for the
entertainment industry to combat redistribution of
their products. Some say the game isn't entirely over,
though. ''I don't think the record companies are
entirely out of bullets,'' says Jonathan Zittrain,
executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for the
Internet and Society. The music companies could market
new music as a service rather than a product; all
music that is recorded in the future would be
delivered as a subscription service via a sort of
celestial jukebox, Zittrain and other industry
analysts have predicted.
Until then, the challenge is up to
the music industry to develop a commercial program
that is easier to use than the underground tools being
released by nonprofit idealists. But so far, the
recording industry's attempts to develop a secure
digital music standard have creeped along without much
success.
Meanwhile, more and more users are
downloading programs like Gnutella. Netscape cofounder
Marc Andreessen and Intel chairman Andy Grove are said
to be fans of the self-perpetuating network. And on
any given night, tens of thousands of people use
Gnutella says engineer Kan, who monitors the network
from home. He says 90 percent of the users are
searching for music and pornography, while the other
10 percent are looking for software or innocuous text
files like his recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie.
''I'm not going to argue that it's correct to break
copyright law and download music, but I do defend the
right to download music I own,'' says Kan. ''And I
think I am representative of people my age and people
younger than I am, too.''
This story ran on
page A01 of the Boston Globe on 5/31/2000.
© Copyright
2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
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