Rambling 6: MP3 Mania!!

The Internet: the wild frontier of modern society, where anything and everything goes. It used to, before the outstretching tentacles of AOL started polluting it. One of the greatest things about the Internet is the free exchange of ideas and information. Unfortunately, this also includes the free exchange of ideas owned by someone else, who may in fact, be peddling those ideas for money.

If you don't already know, an MP3 is a file compression format, which allows an audio file such as a .wav to be scrunched down to sometimes a tenth of its size, without a major loss in audio quality (although, those who have a keen ear can easily hear the limitations). MP3s a useful way of transporting audio files on the Internet, for something that is 10 Megs cannot be easily obtained by someone using a standard dial-up modem, where as a 1 Meg file can. Of course, this an obvious advantage.

MP3s used to be scattered around the internet, uploaded on various servers throughout the world, and finding something worth listening to was akin to striking gold. Well, maybe it wasn't that good, but the idea of searching for MP3s was somewhat of a novelty. There was a useful search engine, called "Scour.net", which made things a bit easier, but finding, for example a rare-live version of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" was difficult at best.

Then, in the very late 90s, a brilliant idea was conceived of. Why not set up a network of people who could download files off of each other, easily and anonymously. I've really no idea who came up with this idea, but one of the first major networks set up that was designed to transmit music was something called "Napster". Napster was a boon to college kids, who have limited incomes, and were fed up with paying the outrageous prices found in most retail music outlets. For the longest time, Napster went on, untouched, and relatively un-talked about by people other than Internet junkies. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the music industry removed its blinders, opened up its lips, and began their dubious policy of demonizing and criminalizing every person who choose to download music. The band who did this first on a national platform was of course Metallica, whose reputation was destroyed by the matter. But in spite of this, the record companies, and the RIAA (an organization who claims they represent the "artists") have only turned up the heat.

Meanwhile, while the musical powers that be try desperately to take the moral higher ground in this matter, they were conspiring to fix the prices of their product so that they could fit a few more dollars in their already fat wallets. Of course, this is nothing new; record companies have been only about business since they have started. As the companies become larger and larger, their practices have become more and more radical and dishonest.

I won't delve into their practices, as they have been well chronicled. But there are a few issues that I'd like to address.

Well first of all, why download? Simple answer: to bring down the record companies! The fact that downloading possibly is "stealing" provides even more justification for this act. The best way to get back at a dishonest organization is to act dishonestly towards them. Am I justifying stealing? Yes! And of course, people are going to fire back with "no one is holding a gun to your head to buy CDs" but lets face it; they are dishonest organizations, and should be punished for doing so. Yes, stick it to man my friends, stick it to the man.

Second, are the musicians who are being "stolen" from. And of course, they are being stolen from the very instant they sign their contract. Many musicians claim that the fans are ripping them off. While, there are people who do want to pirate music, and make a buck off of someone else's good name, this is not the intention of the majority of downloaders; they just want to hear the music, in a world where its increasingly difficult to hear the music. Such people, including myself, are more than willing to pay fair prices for doing so. But the prices and tactics are not fair! Therefore, the musicians are unfortunate victims caught in the crossfire between consumers and business. They do have every right to be mad, but not at the people who download, but at the people who they entrusted their lives work to. For not only have they signed unfair contracts, the companies are not properly seeing to the protection of what few rights they have under that contract.

Third, the Record Companies' attitudes: They claim that downloading is theft; it's the same as if you walked into a music store and shoplifted a CD right off the shelf. Now that argument would hold up, if they didn't engage in such dubious practices themselves. Even then, its difficult to pin a "pirate" label on such downloaders, for to be a pirate, there needs to be some sort of monetary exchange and profit involved. I've yet to hear of a single person making money from the actual peer-to-peer exchange of a song; services like Kazaa are free to their users. What is also rather perplexing is why the power-that-be didn't stamp out this problem before it started. Napster was around some time before it made any sort of widespread national press. Why didn't Time-Warner buy up the rights to the program, make it a fee-based service, and leave it at that? It certainly would have relieved much of the duress both the music industry and Internet users have had to endure over the past 3 years. And, the record companies could have gone about their merry ways, extending its tentacles into every facet of society.

Perhaps its good that things are turning out like they are. It would be difficult to imagine, but it appears as though my generation is increasingly becoming dissatisfied with certain facets of "capitalism". Don't get me wrong, I'm not completely dissing an entire economic "system", but Capitalism works best when the parities involved are on reasonably level ground. But when the parties are not on level ground, it allows the person who is above the others to have a significant advantage over the disadvantaged, and they also have the ability to extend that advantage further and further. Capitalism also enters some very dicey territory when concerned with art, as art is a far more subjective field than say judging the quality of a bushel of wheat. I've come to the conclusion, only recently, that art and capitalism do not mix; the minute you start treating someone's creativity as a commodity, you diminish their humanity. People should not be bought and sold.

Now, the goals of the RIAA, in conjunction with the record companies, is not try and right their wrongs, or make a more equitable marketplace for both consumers and employees, but rather, to waste the time of the American legal and political system. The action against downloaders of MP3s is akin to the government's so-called "war on drugs". Instead of attacking the core of the problem, the publics' dissatisfaction with their product, instead they choose to try and criminalize the problem. Criminalizations of such crusades, where people are pitting themselves in a moral fight with another group, rarely are effective. They might get some people to stop due to fear of being persecuted, but the dedicated become even stronger.

So my bottom line is this: until the record companies wake up and realize what they are not only doing to the public, but an entire generation of people, it is ethical to download music.