Restraints to Electronic Publishing on the Horizon? Norman Desmarais The Internet has changed the nature of publishing. Search engines and electronic indexing services make it easier than ever to identify articles and publications on virtually any topic. Many of these are available in full text as traditional print publishers have made many of their properties available via the Internet. In addition, anybody with access to a PC and an Internet connection can be an author or a publisher. Recent developments in the music industry may have some significant implications for the publishing industry. Music publishers have traditionally controlled, to a large extent, the distribution of the music they publish. This affects the kinds of audiences to which musicians can get exposure and can determine royalty revenues and who becomes a star or a best seller. New musicians may find it very difficult to get the attention of a music publisher and thus to get audience exposure. The Internet has allowed musicians all over the world to publish their own material as a method of promotion in an attempt to increase their audience. Many musicians who don't have a contract with a recording label and many who do are converting their music to the digital MP3 format and distributing them free. The MP3 (MPEG-1, Layer 3) format supports a 12:1 compression ratio that allows recording almost 15 hours of CD -quality audio (Red Book-standard) on a 650 MB (74 minute) CD. This means that a 4-minute CD- Audio file can be compressed from 45 MB to 3.75 MB. This makes MP3 files easy to store and download or transfer at will. This ease of handling and high sound quality, virtually indistinguishable from the uncompressed version, accounts for the proliferation of MP3 sites on the Internet. While some of the music on these MP3 sites may be covered by copyright, most of it is not. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed restraining orders and brought injunctions and lawsuits against sites that violated copyright laws. Michael Robertson, president and CEO of Z Company and owner of the popular MP3.com web site, says "MP3 is an excellent format for artists. Nearly 900 artists have signed up to use MP3, including larger artists like the Beastie Boys who currently have a Top Ten CD hit, and larger labels such as Hollywood Records who have also released hit songs in the MP3 format. . . [T]he majority of traffic in MP3 is legal. Over 4 million legal songs have been downloaded from the MP3.com site alone." Software that tracks the number of times a piece has been accessed or downloaded can help identify musical trends or promising new musicians as they "move up the charts." However, the ease of access has drawn the attention of the RIAA which has filed a suit against Diamond Multimedia (www.diamondmm.com) in an attempt to block the sale of its Rio player. The Rio PMP 300 is a lightweight, portable MP3 player that sells for about $200. It is about the size of a pager a little shorter than an audio cassette and just a little thicker. It has no moving parts, making it ideal for applications that require high-quality audio in extreme environments because it can't skip. The retail package includes a pair of tiny headphones, one AA battery (for a claimed 12 hours of operation), a CD-ROM with 170 MP3 tracks from www.goodnoise.com, and a serial number for $5 worth of downloadable songs from www.mjuice.com. Nordic Entertainment Worldwide (www.nordicdms.com) also sells a portable MP3 player, MPMan; but its offering, priced at $499, contains 64 MB of memory -- twice as much as Rio. Rio's controls consist of play, fast forward, rewind, random play, volume up/down, etc. as well as a simple interface for transferring MP3 files from the user's PC It has no recording feature of its own. It must be connected to a PC via a parallel port adapter (with a pass- through for a printer) to download MP3 files from the Internet or to digitize songs from one's CD collection. Rio comes with MusicMatch's Jukebox software, a shareware program priced at $29.99 (www.musicmatch.com). Jukebox lets users convert tracks from any audio CD into the MP3 format and play songs in any specified order or random order on a multimedia PC. One can also download any desired songs to a Rio and take the music anywhere. The Rio can be used to mix and store up to 60 minutes of digital-quality music or up to eight hours of voice-based audio on 32 MB of flash memory. This storage capacity is probably its greatest limitation; but users can purchase an optional 32 MB flash memory upgrade for $100 to double storage capacity. The Rio has no DC power input, requiring battery operation at all times. It has no controls to boost treble or bass and does not produce sound during fast forward or rewind, making it difficult to cue a particular musical selection. The RIAA, in an attempt to "protect the creative content of the music industry," applied for a temporary restraining order on October 8, 1998 to prevent the sale of the Rio. It claimed that Diamond Multimedia's Rio violated the Audio Home Recording Act and alleged that the Rio "encourages consumers to infringe the rights of artists by traficking in unlicensed music recordings on the Internet." Judge Andrea Collins (Central District Court of California) issued the restraining order on Oct. 16, and required the RIAA to post a $500,000 bond to compensate Diamond for damages incurred in the delay if Diamond eventually prevailed in court. Judge Collins denied the RIAA's application on Oct. 26, stating that "the Rio does not permit downstream copying because the Rio itself has no digital output capability; and the removable flash memory cards cannot be copied by another Rio device." The RIAA filed an appeal which should be decided in early 1999. But even if the RIAA suit is successful, Diamond would have to pay only a 2 percent royalty on all Rio devices and add anticopying circuitry to discourage piracy of copyrighted songs. Two percent seems like a small increment that wouldn't harm Rio's market significantly. Diamond's Ken Wirt says that "clearly, it appears that the RIAA's lawsuit against Diamond is being driven by the interests of its largest members, the 'big five' record labels, who are seeking to maintain their control of music distribution and prevent the unfettered freedom of musicians without recording contracts at their member companies to distribute their music to a broad audience. Upcoming musicians, numbering in the thousands, are using the Internet to their advantage to create awareness in a cost-effective manner, which is clearly a threat to the major record labels' current distribution model." The RIAA succeeded in legislating copy protection mechanisms on all recording devices with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If it is successful in its current lawsuit, the RIAA will tighten even further the restraints on distribution of original music. It seems that the RIAA wants to control the distribution not only of its own properties but also those of non-members. This is tantamount to making it illegal to disseminate music not published through a record label. Extending this analogy to print publications would mean that only publications produced and disseminated by a print publisher are worthy of distribution and that anything not so published is not worthy of consideration. Clearly, there is much important material that never gets published for a wide variety of reasons on both the author's and the publisher's part. Publishers often pass on material that another publisher may accept. Poems, letters, and essays often get collected and published many years after their writing. This does not mean that they were unworthy of attention prior to publication. Consider the case of Doris Lessing who submitted her manuscript for the Diary of a Good Neighbor to several different publishers under the pseudonym Jane Somers in the early 1980s. The publishers rejected it until she revealed her real identity whereupon it met with immediate acceptance. The success of the RIAA lawsuit could give legitimacy to conclusions that only published materials or those published by large companies like Thompson, Bertelsmann, Gulf-Western, Elsevier, Pergamon, McGraw-Hill, etc. are worthy of distribution. Instead of accepting the inevitability of digital distribution and developing ways to implement it, the RIAA staunchly opposes the introduction of new media and new formats. The RIAA could allow audiophiles to create their own CDs by purchasing music on a tune-by-tune basis, just as print publishers charge by the search or by the article viewed or produced. Some of the MP3 web sites have the capability of encoding selections to verify that nominal fees are paid upon access or downloading and for tracking pirated copies. There's also an unremovable watermarking technology, such as that offered by Aris Technologies Inc. and used by companies such as Nordic Entertainment. This software allows Internet-scouting search engines to track down an embedded artist code to trace a file back to the original purchaser. However, instead of advocating change, the RIAA seems to be saying the status quo is the best way to achieve change.