Potential fines for sharing music files staggering

By Peter Vogel

"Radiohead generation believes music is free," said a recent headline in Britain's Telegraph newspaper.

It appeared after one of the biggest acts in rock music, British band Radiohead, decided to release its In Rainbows album directly on the Internet, with fans setting the price. Essentially the album is being given away, the only mandatory charge being a 45 pence credit-card-handling fee.

British acts are developing a music sales model that is effectively bypassing the giants of the recording industry, companies such as Sony, BMI and Universal. A couple of years ago the then unknown Arctic Monkeys made a name for themselves by releasing their work directly to file-sharing networks.

Of course a musical act has to make money eventually. It might be via direct sales, but increasingly it is the live show and all its ancillary merchandising that is driving the music industry. That means the intermediaries, the distribution industry and its moguls, are being cut out of the picture.

Music downloading is pretty much universal among teens I encounter. Often I get a puzzled look when I suggest my students should be buying music rather than downloading it. Why, they typically wonder, would I spend $15 on a CD when I can get the tracks I want for nothing using the LimeWire www.limewire.com file-"sharing" network?

Lest you think this file sharing is small scale, think again. In polling the 100 or so students I have in this year's computer classes, it is rare to find a student who has not downloaded a single song. Even more interesting, it is not unusual to find several in each class who have downloaded more than 1,000 songs.

I've run across students who've amassed more than 5,000 songs and 100 movies or so.

"Everyone does it" is the typical rationale. "It's not illegal, is it?" I'm asked. I doubt many users of the LimeWire service have ever read the company's note to users: "LimeWire is legal software, but it is illegal for you to use LimeWire to share copyrighted files without permission."

It's the murky status of Canadian copyright law that leads to the next question: "What can happen to me if I download?"

I have no choice but to note that to date no one has been prosecuted for file-sharing or music-downloading in Canada. In fact until a few weeks ago no one had been prosecuted in the United States either, although the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been quite effective at making it seem as if many had.

The RIAA's approach in the United States has been to target those with large shared music collections. More than 20,000 have been confronted with "pay up or else" visits and, remarkably, every single such case has been settled with payments in the range of a few thousand dollars.

There is little evidence that such settlements have curbed the appetite for downloading and file-sharing, be it of music or other forms of digital media.

In early October Jammie Thomas of Duluth, Minn., decided to face the RIAA in court. The action specifically concerned just 24 songs supposedly downloaded by Thomas and then shared over the Kazaa network. It seems that this woman couldn't afford much in the way of legal help, as no defence experts were called.

A jury found her guilty of copyright violation and set punishment at almost $10,000 per song, a total fine of almost a quarter of a million dollars.

Some legal experts suggest Thomas got off easy, as the law in the United States permits a fine of up to $150,000 per song. I wonder how the parents of my students with 5,000 songs on their computers would react if they knew of the potential for financial ruin, should Canadian copyright law ever be clarified in this area.

This posting by "Limewire80" in reaction to an InformationWeek www.informationweek.com summary of the Thomas trial captures the essence of the file-sharing nightmare for the recording industry:

I agree that a message has been sent, but probably not by whom you'd expect. People everywhere have been tired of paying $13 or more for a CD and finding they like only two or three songs on it. This is one of the reasons people file-share. Another thing is digital downloads; like only two songs on an album? No problem, just download one or two.

Music piracy isn't a new thing, it's just a lot easier to do than it was in previous decades. The record labels cannot and will not stop it. The best that they can hope for is to recoup some of their losses. The Internet will spell the end of record companies; it's only a matter of time. I don't believe the theft of music is right; I just understand why it's happening and that it cannot be stopped.

"MG1234" is a little more vocal:

The RIAA position is greedy and absurd, and the lawyer who said the woman got off easy at only $10,000 per track is out of his mind. I can't take on the whole money-grubbing industry, but I sure as heck can start boycotting one of the parties to the suit which is particularly vulnerable: Sony. I used to love that company. No more. This is the last straw, after their devotion to weird proprietary formats (memory stick anyone?) and bizarre copy-protection formats.

After taking over EMI, Britain's biggest music publisher, financier Guy Hands told his employees via e-mail that the firm had better adapt to the digital revolution quickly and that it cannot hope to survive on the sale of CDs alone. It's interesting that the message was sent the same week that Radiohead, formerly with EMI, released its album directly to the Internet.

As this column went to press it appeared likely that the Thomas case would be appealed. Thomas herself, who goes by the online name "Tereastarr," in a blog on the case she maintains at blog.myspace.com/tereastarr, rails strenuously against the RIAA and proclaims that she will not be bullied.

There is also unexpected criticism of Radiohead's Internet album release not from the industry, but from fans, some wanting their money back. It seems that the online track releases are at a relatively low 160 kilobits per second rather than the higher quality 320 kbps used for the band's previous releases.

Let's leave the last word for now to this excerpt from LimeWire's copyright information section: "To use LimeWire legally, you must have the owner's permission to share every file in your library on the Gnutella network. For example, music and movies from major labels and movie studios are copyrighted, and you do not have permission to share these files (even if you have bought them)."

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.