The MP3 Killers: How Record Companies Police the Internet Now
Posted by Michelle_Ong on Thursday, Jul 14, 2011
One day in 2009, Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student, opened his mail to discover a fine for $675,000. That was the sum total in damages the record industry reckoned he owed them for sharing 30 songs on the peer-to-peer website Kazaa. The amount was eventually reduced to $67,500.
Tenenbaum’s tale is cautionary at best. We’ve all heard the horror stories that hit a little too close to home—a friend of a friend who downloaded an album, let’s say off Limewire, just for fun, and woke up to a court date and a hefty fine.
With music downloads reaching record-breaking numbers, and CD sales slouching towards obsolescence, it’s clear that the mass consumption of entertainment has moved into the digital sphere.
Surprisingly, a recent study revealed that the percentage of illegal music files (2.9%) floating around the web is much less compared to other forms of media. Illegal downloads of pornography and movies take up a much larger chunk of Internet piracy—35.8% and 35.2% respectively. And music streaming sites are now more popular than illegal downloads.
But this hasn’t deterred big daddy copyright advocacy groups like the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents over 1,600 music labels, from their anti-piracy campaigns. The RIAA has been pervasively maligned for its tactics, which target end-users like you and me for illegal file-sharing. Jonathan Lamy, the RIAA’s senior VP of communications, explains that they manage to track down individual users by asking their Internet service providers, who are “able to match a specific IP address with the account holder.”
The Human Cost of Illegal Downloading
In total, the RIAA has sued approximately 35,000 people since 2003, usually in blitzkrieg-style mass attacks. During one now-infamous incident, it filed 261 lawsuits at a time, including one directed at a 12-year-old girl whose mother had purchased Kazaa Plus.
The inevitable backlash was not lost on the RIAA. The association has more or less jettisoned this method in favor of a different approach: it now targets third-party ISPs with cease-and-desist notifications, which they are required to forward to their miscreant subscribers. If illegal downloading continues, these subscribers face getting their Internet cut off, and/or a lawsuit. The same applies to websites, which is the reason behind the disclaimers that adorn the front pages of many music blogs. “Part of the issue with infringement is for people to be aware that their actions are not anonymous," Mitch Bainwol, the group’s chairman, told the Wall Street Journal.
These notice-and-takedown procedures are inscribed into copyright law, specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was signed by President Clinton in 1998. The DMCA essentially grants immunity to ISPs and other intermediaries for intellectual property violations of their users, as long as they pass along the notices. Furthermore, content can be restored if a user certifies that it is actually non-infringing, or if the claimant fails to sue.
However, a tricky provision in the DMCA is that any flagged content must be taken down immediately on the hosting site, regardless of whether the notice has been evaluated for fairness (or lack thereof). This has sometimes given rise to abuses, such as when Viacom spammed Youtube with 100,000 DMCA take-down requests for unauthorized video clips, or when Diebold, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines cooked up fake claims of copyright infringement in an attempt to cover up flaws revealed in their machines.
Another vague aspect of internet piracy is the fair use clause in the Copyright Act. Exclusive rights to material on the web are flexible if it is being used for education, criticism, reporting, etc. In other words, if you post a Youtube video of your cat dancing to Britney Spears, chances are you won’t get sued for “stealing” Baby One More Time. The uncertainty over what constitutes “fair,” however, brings up a multitude of further questions. Are artists who encourage their fans to use and remix their songs acting irresponsibly?
Beyond The Law
On top of letters and lawsuits, record companies have a few additional ways to monitor illegal downloads. Youtube’s Content ID system is one of the most high-tech (and trippiest) methods that we’ve heard of. Basically, advanced programs scan audio and video files using spectrograms (graphical representations of digital input) for similarities. This allows Youtube to identify similar or duplicate videos, automatically check with its database for the established rules for that specific content, and decide whether to send a take-down notice. Today, a large portion of copyrighted material is left alone by Youtube’s copyright robocops. Instead, with the music labels’ permission, it’s shown side-by-side with revenue-generating advertisements, a cut of which go to the labels.
Record companies also flood peer-to-peer platforms with fake files, using sites like Kazaa to reach out to an enormous, ready made audience of music fans. Instead of downloading the latest Jay-Z song, music pirates are sometimes left with an advertisement for Coca Cola—a twisted form of Rick Rolling, perhaps. “This may seem unfair,” Marvin Ammoli, a legal fellow at the New America Foundation, told me, "but the music industry sees this as a self-help mechanism. It’s like if a burglar comes into your house, and you kick him in the face—isn’t that just self defense?”
Ultimately, the heavy-handed tactics employed by the music industry to punish music pirates haven’t been very successful. Catching individual users and making examples out of them through exorbitant fines only alienates the public and turns record companies into pariahs. One method that seems to be working, however, is improving the availability of legal music through Amazon and iTunes, and through streaming sites like Pandora, Last FM and Google Music – even if the revenue models for such things aren’t yet obvious either. “Ultimately,” Ammoli said, “the best tactic for music companies is to make it mainstream to pay for music online. The easier it is to just buy a song, the less likely people are to go through the hassle that piracy entails.” For the record companies, capitalizing on people’s inherent laziness could be just the solution.
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