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online music Online music is being presented as the 'canary down the mine' for both intellectual property and commercial electronic publishing. In coming weeks we'll be providing an introduction to that debate, along with comments on legal and technological issues. Some pundits acclaim technologies such as Napster and Gnutella as the death of copyright or of record companies. That view of 'old media' as a road-kill on the information highway was represented at the January 2001 Future of Music conference and in Ken Silverman's thesis on The Implications of MP3 Technology & Digital Distribution on the International Music Industry & Its Stakeholders. Others argue that it's merely a matter of time before law (contract and IP) and technologies put the genie back into the bottle. Harold Vogel's Entertainment Industry Economics (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 98), Lawrence Lessig's Code & Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York, Basic Books 99) and Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools & Research (Cambridge, MIT Press 00), edited by Erik Brynjolfsson & Brian Kahin suggest why 'garage' publishing and major recording conglomerates may co-exist in future. James Coover's Music Publishing, Copyright & Piracy in Victorian England (London, Mansell 85) provides a historical perspective on Lessig's question of what would happen if government actively regulated IP and other aspects of cyberspace, given anaemic enforcement of the US 1997 No Electronic Theft Act and 98 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Coover documents how a "determined blend of legislation, litigation and leg-breaking" snuffed out the thriving music piracy business at the beginning of last century. There are other perspectives in our profile on past communications revolutions, in particular the recording and broadcasting pages. For the notion of the music business as unlike other content industries consult Norman Lebrecht's mordant When The Music Stops (New York, Simon & Schuster 96) and Fredric Dannen's acerbic Hit Men: Power Brokers & Fast Money Inside The Music Business (New York, Vintage 91).       MP3 MP3 is a standard for the compression of audio recordings, with that music being played on personal computers and special MP3 devices. It's proved significantly more popular than proprietary formats such as Microsoft's Windows Media Audio Player (WMA).  Compression means that files - generally a single song - can be distributed over the net, whether from a central repository or between individual personal computers. That means performers and publishers can go direct to consumers. It has also meant that consumers and commercial pirates can ignore concerns about intellectual property: use a search engine to find an authorised or illicit copy of the particular recording and download it for free.  Many consumers consider that the loss of sound quality during compression is offset by the convenience of accessing the music. And for many there' a s frisson in appropriating the property of the evil record companies.  Estimates about the use (and misuse) of MP3 are problematical. Overall it is likely that there are over a billion files in cyberspace, with a considerable number of duplicates. The economic impact is unclear. Research by the independent Pew Internet & American Life project suggests that about 13 million US citizens (14% of US internet users) have downloaded free music files that they do not own in other forms, although figures for 'repeat' downloading are less certain. Perhaps less than 2% of internet users have paid for downloading music. Chris Gilbey's The Infinite Digital Jukebox: Everything You Need To Know About Downloading CD-Quality Music From The Internet (South Yarra, Hardie Grant 00) is an introduction for consumers to MP3.  There's a more intelligent examination of intellectual property issues in Paul Goldstein's Copyright's Highway: The Law & Lore of Copyright from Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox (New York, Hill & Wang 94).      Napster The ease with which digital music can be copied means that record companies have been reluctant to distribute music online from central repositories, pending the establishment of effective copy protection systems such as SDMI. Their perception has been that placing a recording on the web means kissing goodbye to the intellectual property. That has not stopped businesses such as Napster, now a Bertelsmann subsidiary, which sought to act as commercial intermediaries in the 'peer-to-peer' distribution of recordings between personal computers. That distribution is often described as 'swapping', although most studies suggest that 93% of the traffic is one-way (ie most consumers only download). An October 2000 paper by Eytan Adar & Bernardo Huberman on Free Riding on Gnutella for example argues that 70% of Gnutella users share no files, with 50% of activity involving the top 1% of hosts. Others have noted the high incidence of mislabelled, defective or partial files on Napster and P2P systems. Napster (like rivals such as Scour) established a central server to facilitate identification of and access to MP3 files held on the personal computers of its subscribers. The server identified each machine and the MP3 files, becoming what some of the more starry-eyed described as "nothing more than the world's largest music directory".  It did not differentiate between authorised and illegal copies, with critics alleging that 87% of files on the server were illegal copies. At its peak Napster probably had over 40 million subscribers, with perhaps  600 000 songs available via its server and as many as a billion MP3 files located somewhere in cyberspace.  Although the Napster server was not a permanent repository of MP3 files it was the basis of a large-scale commercial operation based in in a particular jurisdiction and thus subject to a range of law. In December 1999 the Recording Industry Association of America litigated against Napster, MP3.com, Scour and similar bodies. It was joined by other rights owners and gained the support of performers such as Metallica. The rights owners successfully charged that Napster and similar intermediaries were contributing to copyright infringements by facilitating the distribution of illegal MP3, video recordings and other files. The RIAA for example claimed US$100 000 in damages for each infringing file.  In response to the litigation some of facilitators, such as Scour, closed after investors withdrew funding. Some, such as MP3.com, changed their operation after US courts imposed multi-million dollar fines and rejected claims that activity was protected by the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA). Caught between unsympathetic courts and waning investor support, Napster succumbed to the embrace of Bertelsmann, one of the three global music giants.       gnutella 'Free Music' advocates have dismissed Napster as irrelevant, argung that the future lies in regimes that don't involve an intermediary and don't involve any payment, thereby evading detection. Despite the hype about an irresistible "earthquake" that will sweep away traditional publishing (in particular the satanic record companies), file-swapping systems such as Gnutella remain a fringe activity.  That's partly because the software - like Linux - is not consumer friendly. As one insider says "Gnutella is not for mainstream users who don't understand what an IP address is".  And it's partly because network problems mean that access to the music is very slow, so slow indeed that most casual users simply give up.  Despite the hype, much of the growth of Napster has been about economics and ease of use, rather than against copyright. Our expectation is that faced with a choice between mastering gnutella and a small monthly for high quality legal access, most consumers will simply plump for the subscription. That will reduce the number of copyright violators, enhancing industry enforcement measures, encouraging growth of subscriptions, and so on.      next page  (plagiarism)