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MIND

Flux
flux@microsoft.com
Douglas Boling
MP3: Blame it on Rio
I
t always amazes me how buggy whip manufacturers never give up believing in the past. So it is with the recording industry and its reaction to the audio compression standard MPEG 1 layer 3, or MP3 for short. If you haven't heard of MP3, it's an audio compression scheme that provides close to CD-quality music with about a 10-to-1 compression ratio.
      MP3 enables you to store massive amounts of music in your computer. Think about it. Currently an album takes up one CD, or about 600MB of data. With MP3 it's compressed to 60MB. IBM has announced 25GB drives for PCs, which will let you store 400 albums on your disk and still leave you with a gigabyte for Microsoft® Office.
      Of course, storing those files on a specially built music server would be more appropriate. I've always wanted to have a whole-house stereo system, but one of the problems was playing more than one CD at a time in the house. While Kenwood now has a 200-disk CD system with dual players, the better solution would be a large disk drive and multiple MP3 decoders.
      A portable, Walkman-sized MP3 player is currently on the market from Diamond Multimedia. The Rio is totally digital. It has no moving parts and therefore doesn't suffer the skipping problem that is the bane of any runner using a portable CD player. The Rio will store 60 minutes of MP3 audio that can be downloaded from a PC.
      You would think that this new technology would have the music industry excited over new opportunities to sell music. Unfortunately, the recording industry and their lobbying organization, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is fighting MP3 tooth and nail. The RIAA is in a snit because the MP3 file standard can be used to distribute pirated copies of compressed copyrighted music over the Internet. As a software developer, I've always been a proponent of good copyright protection, but the recording industry's arguments against MP3 are just plain silly.
      The first argument is that hordes of young music listeners (it's always youth who cause problems) will each buy one album, encode it into MP3, upload the files to the Internet, and distribute that album to everyone else on the planet. Of course, the result of this action would be total chaos and the collapse of the world economy. What a crock. Ever try downloading a 4MB file over a 56Kbps line? And that is only one song worth of data.
      There are valid problems with illegal distribution of copyrighted works, but the recording industry needs to take a Valium and look to the software industry as an example. Ever since Lotus dropped its annoying but easily cracked copy protection scheme for 1-2-3, the software industry has not just survived but thrived without draconian measures to prevent the copying of applications. While pirated software is a problem, for most people it's easier to buy the software than to find and download a pirated version. Rigorous enforcement to shut down pirate distributors on the net has also helped.
      The folks at the RIAA also want to shut down MP3 for another reason. With MP3 users can actually copy CDs onto a hard disk for later playing! Sounds exactly like what's done today with software. So in effect all MP3 does is bring the recording industry software (music) into the same situation that the computer software industry has been in since day one. Frankly, it doesn't sound like that big a deal—unless you consider one other aspect of the situation.
      The recording industry has been around for over 60 years. In that time, they have always had their software (music) bound to a record or CD. If a user damaged a record, they had to go back and pay a second time for the same music. Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it? Imagine if the software industry required users to pay a second time for software if their hard disk crashed!
      The problem is that with MP3 or a similar technology, law-abiding people can copy the CDs they buy onto a reusable medium. Then, if something happens to the copy, they can go back to the pristine CD they stored away in a safe place. There's no need to pay twice (or even three times) for the same recording.
      Another issue is the evil thought that artists (those annoying folks who actually produce the software the music industry sells) might use MP3 to bypass the standard channels and distribute their music over the Internet. This would break, or at least weaken, the recording industry's current monopoly of music distribution.
      The battle over MP3 will be a telling one. If manufacturers are successful in getting MP3 stopped by having Congress pass stifling laws, it won't just be the Diamond MP3 players that will be affected. That new computer design or software application you're developing will also be brought under the scrutiny of the copyright police. If they approve your product, you may be allowed to market it. With, of course, the requisite pseudo-royalty payment to the proper authorities. Watch closely, developers; trouble is afoot.

From the January 1999 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer.