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Mark Abernethy

Dot Communism

27 July 2000

The Bulletin

Submitted for Best Feature category

Ask any 18-year-old where you can buy a copy of the latest Microsoft software and you’ll probably be greeted by a blank stare. For the generation aged 12 to 24, buying software is something “old” people do.

This Digital Generation simply finds what it wants on the internet and downloads it for free, whether it's music, software, DVDs or games. It's a crime costing millions in unpaid royalties and one that is carried out in such numbers it has the capacity to make copyright irrelevant. “I suppose the question is whether a law is valid when it is impossible to enforce,” says Ian Clarke, the 23-year-old creator of Freenet, the latest and most untraceable of the networks in which the young pirates flourish. “And I think the obvious answer is ‘no’. ”Clarke sits like a beacon atop the Digital Generation – the first cohort to accept a digitised, interconnected world as an entitlement rather than a Jetsons-like development. And, like most of his peers, Clarke does not accept that copyright even exists, let alone that it is worth obeying.

Between 300,000 and 1.5 million digital media files are now carried on the internet. But the copyright owners can not always collect their royalties because most of the files are illegal copies, available to anyone with a PC, an internet connection and a piece of enabling software. The losses each month are in the tens of millions of dollars, as contraband files inundate the internet and an older generation seems unable to construct a way to make money from the phenomenon. “It appears artists and the music industry have already lost the battle,” claimed a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times.

As fast as the investigators and lawyers funded by Microsoft and Sony can close down the contraband sites, others grow to fill the gap. At networks such as Gnutella, Napster, Freenet and Hotline – nets within the internet known as “peer-to-peer” networks – users can access and download each other’s files. Because there is no money changing hands, users argue they are not “pirates” but merely enthusiasts exchanging files from their collections.

The coming of high-speed cable connections, especially at big United States and Australian universities, has worsened the piracy problem by allowing a standard 20-minute download of an MP3 to be completed in just 20 seconds.

To play the music the users simply plug their PCs into a stereo, download their music files into a portable MP3 player such as a Diamond Rio or just listen to their music straight from their iMacs. The record companies have come back with SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative), which means only industry-encoded MP3s can be played on, for instance, the Sony Memory Stick Walkman. Sony Corporation has also put a ribbon through its DVDs that it claims makes it three times as expensive to copy the DVD as it is to buy it.

But as Jeffrey Bartolomei, online licensing officer at the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA) says, the copyright pirates “crack” software, music and DVDs “because it’s fun”.

And while the pirates may be young, they are making inroads. “Sure, Napster is hurting the companies,” says Bartolomei. “Napster shows people how to go into a store and pinch a CD without being caught.”The problem with file-swapping systems such as Napster, Gnutella and My MP3 is that one person may buy a CD, thus paying the royalty. He can then convert it into the MP3 format and upload it into the swapping network, which allows millions of users to download it without paying a cent. A rock band such as Metallica, which makes between $2 and $4 per CD sold, could lose millions in one afternoon.

“They see no problem with it,” says senior lecturer in information systems at the University of Western Sydney, Philip Brook, of the new generation’s attitude to internet piracy. “They see it, it’s free, they take it. They have a different way of seeing things.

”Different may be an understatement. A recent survey published by CNNfn showed 70% of the polled US college students had downloaded at least one illegal MP3 from the Napster file-swapping system in the past week. The sale of CD-Rs – blank recordable CDs – have risen by 1000% in some US music stores as the young burn their own music CDs from their downloads.

The law has not given up; in the US the Napster site was challenged by Metallica, who alleged more than 300,000 users of the file-sharing system had been swapping Metallica tracks without paying royalties. Another US court held that the My MP3 file-swapping system was liable for illegal file swaps made on the network.

The reason that copyright itself seems to have gone on trial as the MP3 becomes the calling card of a generation is that not all bands react as Metallica has. When Metallica (whose members are in their 30s and 40s) first let loose their lawyers on the file-swappers, the band was swamped with hate mail from their fans. Meanwhile, the teen cult band – Limp Bizkit – has endorsed MP3, Napster and swappers, thus becoming one of the most streamed bands on the internet.

Australia is signatory to international copyright covenants such as the Berne Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention and the NAFTA-sponsored agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Supply. But the kids are not listening.

In Canberra the government is still in a pickle about digital technologies, as the porn-blocking debacles and the flip-flops on digital television have shown. Now parliament is refining the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill, which seeks to upgrade the Copyright Act 1968 into a digital context. But copyright still only works where people respect it or where they can be caught if they abuse it. The bill can’t stop a 17-year-old searching Napster for every bootlegged Ben Harper track she can find, and a law in Australia won’t make the big record companies re-think their business models to allow for the way the Digital Generation uses technology. Most of all, a law passed in Canberra won’t push the young back to the ancient “album” format, which forced them to buy 12 tracks they didn’t want to get the two they did.

A generation that has grown up accepting the idea of “free” content on the internet is hardly going to fall for the “concept albums” and rip-off prices that the baby boomers defined themselves with.

Besides, say lawyers such as Sydney entertainment attorney Michael Frankel, the bill may have lost its moral strength because it has ducked central issues.

“What are you going to do? Sue a 15-year-old because he’s downloaded The Matrix, burned a CD and given it to his friends? You have to go for the source of the information – the ISP – but the [Copyright Amendment] Digital Agenda Bill has protected the ISPs from that kind of attack.

”The Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill is already a political camel, having exempted ISPs from most copyright infringement liabilities by their users in exchange for a one-off payment to AMCOS (the body representing recording companies) and APRA, which represents creatives.

“This generation has the post-modernist attitude that everything’s up for grabs,” says Frankel of the Digital Generation. “It’s a sense of entitlement.

”The Digital Generation may be moving too quickly and savagely for many oldies; as the courts move on My MP3 and Napster, other file-swapping “peer-to-peer” networks such as the clandestine Gnutella and Freenet are gaining favour.

Whether copyright is dead or just in the throes of radical change, it is worth hearing what the creator of Freenet, Ian Clarke has to say from a generational standpoint. “If this whole thing catches on, I think people will look back in 20 to 40 years and look at the idea you can own information like gold or real estate in the same way we look at witch-burning today.

”If a powerful, savvy generation simply disregards the model of information as property, all the law changes and conventions in the world may not be enough to save copyright.