Free music hits wrong chord with industry

By CHRIS BARTON

Most home use of the internet is for porn, right? Apparently not. The number one activity of home users is downloading free music.

At least that's what a senior internet provider executive told me last week over a glass or two of Christmas cheer.

Sucking music down your telephone line to your PC accounts for 38 per cent of home use. Downloading pornography is a distant second at 22 per cent.

Latest figures from the United States research firm Webnoize appear to back the claim - showing Napster replacements KaZaA (www.kazaa.com), Grokster (www.grokster.com) and Morpheus's Music City (www.musiccity.com) together transferred 1.81 billion files last month.

That's a little shy of the 2.79 billion songs downloaded via Napster in its heyday and before it was shut down by a US court in June.

But it is getting close - and that's not counting other Napster-like networks such as Gnutella (www.gnutella.com) and AudioGalaxy (www.audiogalaxy.com). Free music lives again. Or does it?

A Dutch judge ruled last month that KaZaA must stop its users sharing copyrighted music files.

But how the company - which, like Grokster and Morpheus uses software from FastTrack (www.fasttrack.nu) - can comply with the order is still to be played out.

Unlike Napster's centralised servers, the software is distributed - running on the network of hundreds of thousands of users' PCs around the world. Simply shutting down KaZaA's site won't stop the sharing.

Grokster and Morpheus are also headed for court and judging by the music industry's legal success so far, both companies are going to lose.

The thorny issue is copyright in the digital age - something the file-sharers acknowledge is a problem.

Take Grokster's licence agreement: "Please note that Grokster respects the right of copyright owners and is fully committed to protect their rights ... We, therefore, ask you to pay special attention to avoid violating copyright laws and regulations.

"As a condition of using the Grokster products and services, you must agree that you will not use Grokster to infringe the intellectual property or other rights of others in any way ... "

Couldn't be plainer. Why, then, when I last looked were 430,409 users online sharing 65,244,000 files? Because everyone is respecting the rights of copyright owners, I guess. My effort with KaZaA over the weekend showed just how easy that is. Within about 15 minutes I had downloaded the software and was set to go.

Within 10 minutes I had the stunning Roundabout from Yes stored on my PC's hard disk - ready to take me back to another era whenever I feel in the Moog mood. The 10-year-old, offended by the racket, asked me to download some real music - Blue's All Rise and Shaggy's Luv Me Luv Me. Ten minutes later it was there - although after 10 seconds of listening, Shaggy was deleted. His music should be banned.

But the deed was done. Strangely, I didn't feel guilty. After all, there is quite a bit of free music to be heard on the radio - and this, just as it did in the Napster era, feels like that. Free music for the masses.

But from the music industry's point of view it is not like radio because there is no control over how often these songs are given away free over the net.

So what's the industry to do?

Attack on three fronts. The vanguard are the lawyers, whose mission is to relentlessly pursue every last file-sharing service until none is left standing.

Buoyed by recent success and with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the might of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on their side, these guys think they can't lose.

But the battle already has the hallmarks of a long and bitter guerrilla war.

No sooner has one file-sharer been shut down than another pops up. And while the RIAA may be able to control things on its own turf, a difficult cross-border jurisdiction quagmire lies not far ahead.

But lawyers are a tenacious breed and, as we have seen with Microsoft's army, they'll pursue copyright infringers to the end of the earth.

Front two is to start fee-paying services like the new MusicNet (www.musicnet.com) where, for a $US9.95 monthly fee, users can stream or download tunes from the libraries of AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI Group.

But there are a few conditions. The fee gets only 100 downloads a month, the music no longer works after 30 days and it can't be stored on a portable music player or burned on to a compact disk.

If the free stuff is still out there, it's hard to see how these services will have much appeal.

The third front is to put copyright protection at the source. Not impossible, but not as easy as it sounds.

Ask BMG, which last month was forced to issue replacements for Natalie Imbruglia's latest CD after copy protection caused problems when playing on some CD and DVD players.

Despite the bungle, most record companies are moving as fast as they can with copyright locks.

No doubt the hackers will be moving as fast as they can to be the first to crack these new barriers to freedom.

* chris_barton@nzherald.co.nz