Con: Entertainment executives exaggerate the problem of music downloading.
By Michael Travis
Editor in Chief
By this time, we’ve all heard the notorious name “Napster” and realize its implications.
We’ve also all heard all of the legal and ethical arguments against downloading digital music.
Several music moguls and musicians have engaged in a crusade to eradicate file-sharing technology entirely, claiming that they were losing millions or more in sales to these digital pirates.
The problem with all of these arguments is three-fold — the music industry hasn’t lost as much as they claim, there really aren’t that many people who burn music rather than buy music, and previous attempts to stop developing technologies by the entertainment industry have failed miserably.
The recent slump in record sales has often been blamed on Internet piracy. Record company executives have blamed file-swapping Napster-clone services like Morpheus and KaZaA as the cause of this problem.
While blaming the Internet may seem to sound good, there is actually a more plausible explanation for music’s recent financial troubles.
The executives, in their towers of glass and steel, have forgotten one thing – the recording industry is not the only industry that suffered losses last year.
After Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Stock Exchange lost more than 4,000 points — almost a third of its total value, and it never really recovered. In 2002, people had less money to spend.
Almost every business in the United States took a hit, some much greater than the 5 percent that the music industry experienced.
While downloading music on the Internet may seem fairly simple at first, it’s actually a fairly technical — and time consuming — process.
Not to mention the fact that only 10 percent of Internet users have a broadband connection, which is almost mandatory for downloading music files.
On a standard dial-up modem, downloading an average size music file of about four megabytes can take up to 15 minutes or more. This means that downloading the 12 to 15 tracks that fit on a CD can take up to two hours.
After the files are downloaded, they must be converted to the proper format, arranged in the desired order, and “burned” onto a CD, which can take another hour — or more.
The point is that not everyone has three or four hours to spend in front of a computer making a CD to listen to, especially when they have a full- time job, family, friends or other responsibilities.
With a 40-hour work week, free time is a valuable commodity — if anything, people are willing to pay for the convenience of buying an album at a record store.
Thus, those who are actually downloading the files and burning them have enough time on their hands to do it — like college students — or weren’t going to spend the money on a “legal” CD in the first place.
The court battles over Internet file-sharing bear a haunting resemblance to a court case in the mid 1980s that involved technology and copyrighted material.
During this time, the VCR became popular, and the movie industry filed a lawsuit claiming that people would use the technology to make illegal copies of their work and broadcast or sell it, thus “pirating” and infringing on copyright laws.
In this case, the Supreme Court stated that those who provided a service or made a product were not responsible for what people did with that product. Did the VCR ruin the movie industry? No. It has made them billions.
The primary difference between VCRs and Internet file-sharing programs is that the programs, as of yet, have no legitimate or legal use, thus giving them the negative “piracy” image that they currently have.
Instead of trying to destroy internet file-sharing, the recording industry should recognize the huge potential it has to make lots of people rich.
A recent study showed that the majority of people who use file-sharing programs would be willing to pay something for the music that they download, as long as it was easy to use and had what they were looking for.
One thing is certain — trying to fight the rise of digital copying technology isn’t going to work. The costly court battles have only made Napster-clone services more popular.
The final responsibility of controlling Internet file sharing, then, rests on the makers of the music.
There is an old saying that fits this situation perfectly:
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
January 16, 2003