It's All Free!

  • PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY MICHAEL ELINS

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    But the legal fight is far from a sure thing. Copyright laws are slippery and subjective — the judge in the Grokster case made a special plea in his ruling asking Congress to fix gaps in the laws that cover file sharing. Enforcing those laws is also tricky. Colleges, where a lot of the downloading goes on, like to think of themselves as bastions of privacy and free speech, not copyright police. The international reach of the Internet makes enforcement even dodgier. Case in point: in 1999 Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, figured out how to break the copy protection on commercial DVDs, making possible the cheap, high-quality, a la carte copying of movies. This information became, shall we say, fairly popular on the Internet, earning Johansen, who was 15 at the time, the nickname "DVD Jon." In 2000 Norwegian prosecutors, egged on by the M.P.A.A., charged him with violating digital-security laws. In January the verdict came in: Johansen got off. An appeals hearing is scheduled for December.

    There's another problem with suing people: it doesn't make you popular with your customers — and Big Media are already fighting a major p.r. battle. Everybody who has ever watched VH1's Behind the Music has heard musicians bad-mouth their record labels, and no one is going to feel bad for ripping off the suits who ripped off their favorite rock star. File sharing has become cool, a way to fight the power, to stick it to the Man. Re-engineering the public image of studio executives probably isn't in the cards — these are, after all, the same companies that coughed up $143 million last October to settle a class action accusing them of price fixing — but in the past few months, more and more artists have begun speaking out, and they stand a better chance of winning sympathy. For years musicians and other artists were reluctant to address file sharing, in part because they saw how uncool Metallica's James Hetfield looked when he tried. But in September the likes of Nelly, the Dixie Chicks, Brian Wilson and the incontrovertibly cool Missy Elliott delivered televised antipiracy scoldings. In April, Ben Affleck appeared in an antipiracy spot on behalf of the movie industry. Still, you don't have to be Alanis Morissette to spot the irony in a zillionaire celebrity pleading for sympathy. After a spoofed version of Madonna's new album, American Life , started circulating on the Net, featuring a recording of the Material Girl saying "What the f--- do you think you're doing?", a hacker took over the singer's website, Madonna.com , and posted real, downloadable MP3s of every song on the album.

    The entertainment industry's grand plan for surviving piracy isn't just about the stick; there's a carrot too, a big one. The Internet offers a whole new way of selling music, and when music and movie executives are not expressing their outrage over downloading, they are salivating over a potentially massive revenue opportunity. There are already a couple of dozen legal, pay-to-play downloading services, including Pressplay, Listen.com's Rhapsody and Music Net. Apple Computer has a new service, which was slated for rollout this Monday, that's meant to integrate seamlessly with its iPod MP3 player and its iTunes music software. Movie and TV downloading websites are sprouting up as well. Movielink, which is backed by five major Hollywood studios, made its debut in November and features a library of more than 300 films. SoapCity.com offers online episodes of daytime serials.

    But these services face competition you wouldn't wish on Bill Gates. Unlike, say, Kazaa, they have to clear each song or movie or show for digital distribution with each individual artist and studio. They have made significant progress — Pressplay, for example, has upwards of 300,000 tracks available for download, with membership starting at $9.95 a month — but it's slow work. The for-pay services also mire users in a mesh of restrictions that limit what they can do with the music they download. That $9.95 plan at Pressplay buys you unlimited downloads, but you can't move the songs to your portable MP3 player or burn copies of them onto a CD, and you can listen to them only so long as you're a Pressplay subscriber. Miss a payment, and the files lock up. For $8 more a month, Pressplay gives you 10 "portable" downloads that are free of those constraints. But compare that with the roughly infinite number of unrestricted, unconstrained, infinitely copyable downloads that Kazaa offers for roughly nothing, and you can see that Pressplay has an uphill battle on its hands.

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