AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
METALLICA, those late-’80s champions of politically-progressive heavy metal, are among the bands playing next month’s grand opening weekend for Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
This means one of the first personal-computer zillionaires is hiring a band that’s just become known as the chief party-poopers of the digital-music-distribution revolution.
For those just tuning in, a little history:
- The Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), a consortium of computer and electronics companies who developed the data format for DVDs, devised a standardized format for compressed digital audio called MPEG-1 Level 3, or MP3 for short.
- College students and other “warez traders” quickly caught on to MP3 as a means for the computerized “home taping” and sharing of song files.
- The major record labels (through their lobby group, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)) moved to shut down centralized websites and FTP servers where folks were giving away or trading MP3s.
- Some clever programmers came up with a workaround solution called Napster.
Napster’s own servers don’t hold or download any MP3s. Instead, they provide links, searches, and a standard downloading protocol for thousands of individual users’ own sites. You’re not downloading a song from Napster; you’re just using Napster to find the song on another individual’s server and to download it from there.
- The major labels and the RIAA, natch, have tried to figure out how to legally stop Napster. They persuaded some colleges to ban its use on students’ Net accounts; but that wasn’t enough.
- Enter Metallica.
The aging band, which hasn’t had many new hits lately but still has an avid cult following, agreed to put its name and populist reputation on the line in the most aggressive kill-Napster campaign to date.
This gave the industry a convenient front group for its actions. The band could claim it was working on behalf of “artists’ rights;” even though the industry’s moving in other forums (including proposed copyright-law revisions) to stifle artists rights and redefine all releases as “works for hire” to be owned by the labels in perpituity.
- As part of its suit against Napster, the band filed in court a list of what it claimed were over 300,000 Napster users whom, the band’s attorneys claimed, had uploaded or downloaded pirated Metallica tunes.
- Napster agreed to purge these users from its databases. Over 17,000 of them have joined a petition demanding Napster either let them back on or prove they’d traded Metallica songs.
(Yes, in both cases it’s the little Napster enterprise that’s getting sued.)
- Some of the banned users are re-registering under other names. Napster installed software to identify them by their Internet DNS addresses and prevent their re-joining. Some have employed software tricks to thwart this prevention mechanism. Napster has banned discussion of these get-back-on software tricks from its official message boards.
Even if Napster is forced out of business by this or any subsequent industry suits, its principle of decentralized file-serving and file-searching is here, probably to stay.
Other outfits, even smaller and less suable than Napster, can (and are) expanding upon the concept and making new software tools for anonymous, authority-free, intellectual-property-be-damned file trading.
These tools wouldn’t be used just for hit music but for files of all types–software code, porn, movies, political documents certain governments around the world want to keep from their citizens, drug recipes, conspiracy theories, Scully-and-Mulder sex stories, etc. etc.
Metallica, meanwhile, has taken a lot of heat from fans and ex-fans over its new-found public image as stooges for the RIAA’s showbiz weasels. So far, they’re not backing down.
So it’s only appropriate they’re playing for Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft–and former owner of Ticketmaster.
MONDAY: The “in” typeface for 2000.
ELSEWHERE:
