Word: files
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This isn't how it was supposed to be. A little more than three years ago the Recording Industry Association of America (R.I.A.A.), which represents most U.S. record labels, filed suit against Napster, the granddaddy of file-sharing services, for "contributory and vicarious copyright infringement." The R.I.A.A. won; Napster lost. A judge ordered its servers shut down. End of story...
Hardly. The file-sharing services didn't go away. They evolved, getting smarter and more decentralized and harder to shut down. Napster's network relied on a central server, an Achilles' heel that made it easier to unplug and shut down. But Kazaa, now the most popular file-sharing software, is built around a floating, distributed network of individual PCs that has no center. There's no single plug to pull. Kazaa has savvily chosen a decentralized business strategy too: it's a mirage of complicated partnerships with the official owner, Sharman Networks, tucked away on the South Pacific island...
First order of business: evolve some claws. Some labels (they're reluctant to identify themselves) hire professional counterhackers, companies like Overpeer, based in Manhattan, that specialize in electronic countermeasures such as "spoofing"--releasing dummy versions of popular songs onto file-sharing networks. To your average Kazaa user they look like the real thing, but when you download them, they turn out to be unplayable. Movie studios, meanwhile, staff screenings with ushers wearing night-vision goggles to suss out would-be pirates with camcorders. When Epic Records distributed review copies of the new Pearl Jam album last fall, it sent them...
...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...
...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...