Mp3s Essay Research Paper With the creation

Mp3s Essay, Research Paper

With the creation of new technologies and forums of media, industries must respond and adapt to the changes they create. The new technology of MP3s challenges the music recording industry today. MP3 stands for Motion Picture Expert Group Audio Layer 3 and, for those who do not know, is an audio file format that gives near CD quality sound compressed ten times that of the current standard. “MP3″ lists as one of the top five searched terms on Lycos and Hotbot (Kirchofer 1) and ranks up there with the word “Sex” on Yahoo! and Excite (Raihala 1). This new technology has its obvious advantages, but in its ability to aid the music industry it also aids those pirates and bootleggers who have been a thorn in the record industries side since day one. Due to this, the music industry has been trying their hardest to stop the spread of MP3s. If the music industry was spending resources trying to stop MP3s they could benefit from its capabilities. Piracy is the one problem that makes MP3s so controversial. Without this problem there would be absolutely no argument made. Piracy has been a problem in music since its corporate conception. “You look out there and there is a generation of people that think wrongly that music is free,” says Nicholas DiGiacomo, vice president of Scient Corp. (Kirchofer 2). The Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA, reports that piracy costs them approximately $1 million a day is (Raihala 3). They total the world loss to be around $5 billion (Edgars 2). “I think it’s very similar to prostitution. The guy in Italy making copies is the pimp. The product you’re buying are the whores,” Rusty Harmon, manager of Hootie & the Blowfish, said (Edgars 1). MP3s come in to this by allowing piracy to easily occur over the Internet. Frank Creighton director of investigations for the RIAA said himself, “You have the equipment, you have the smarts, you have the bandwidth” (Edgars 2). To begin with the requirement to play MP3s are the standard computer: Pentium class processor or better, speakers, a sound card, and a player. Transfer is another matter though still not very complex to the average web surfer. First, one copies an MP3 from the CD. The WAV formats file one gets encoded using special but readily available and free software. Now, one posts the file over the Internet. There are many places on the to post files, and the majority of them are free. Free web site space is available at sites such as TheGlobe, Angelfire, Geocities, Xoom, Tripod, etc.. An alternative to a web site is also the usenet, a series of servers for posting messages and files for the general public. Transfer also occurs over chat rooms such as IRC, Hotline, or any of the many new Java chats. After they have the file it can be played off of the harddrive or decoded and burned onto a CD to be used on any CD player. A group in Europe consisting of 15 people with CD burners have 200 CDs with 150 songs each in MP3 format. They Plan on reaching 1,000 (Robertson 1). MP3s are so easy to get and send that no one ever thinks twice whether it is legal or not. “The same people who wouldn’t think of shoplifting a CD from Tower Records don’t think twice about downloading it on their home computer,” Cary Sherman of the RIAA says, “Somehow, we need to make it uncool for people to rip off artists they love by taking music without their permission” (Wehrman 2). The majority of the funds for fighting piracy Piracy is so common that the RIAA has made 1500 arrests since 1993 for it (Raihala 3). Cary Sherman himself found 80 illegal sites and more than 2 thousand illegal recordings in one afternoon sitting on the Internet (Wehrman 2). In its great attack on piracy 15 stores were shutdown and two web sites were sued by the RIAA with the help of it’s mock police force(Raihala 2). During this mad crusade the RIAA managed to threaten a 15 year old kid with jail and a $250,000 fine for merely having a webpage that linked to MP3 distributing sites (Raihala 3). These tactics as much as they seem to get things done really do nothing. When some one is forced out of a web site they just find another, and as new copyright protection is found it is broken by some college student with spare time. As Richard Gusler, Lawyer fo Hootie & the Blowfish, said:”Every time some one comes up a new technology to stop pirating, some guy or girl at a college somewhere comes up with a way to get by. My fear is that this is a black hole we’re jumping into, and I don’t believe we’re going to find a way to stop it” (Edgars 2). In the end all that happens is the fans get angry at the label. Many companies are finally realizing this such as TVT Records. They do not mind the posting of singles from their label but ask that whole albums not be made immediately available. Frank Davis of Caroline Records said:”By going out and using Gestapo tactics and purely legalese decrees about MP3, we’re going to offend a great deal of our fan base and generate ill will for the label” (Railhala 3). Back when recording tapes first came out the music industry had the same reaction as they are to MP3s (Raihala 1). They believed that people would begin to just tape whatever they wanted to see and wouldn’t buy records or got to movies. As can be seen the industries survived and in fact even increased sales during the time. Their reaction as seeable with hindsight was extreme compared to its truth. Though piracy over the Internet is co