Compared to the March super-bust of 13 individuals in 12 countries on 40 counts of conspiring to manufacture and distribute bootleg CDs, the shutting down of a single Web site by the administration of a small East Coast university may seem insignificant.
The implications of the shutdown, however - following a series of letters to the university by the Recording Industry Association of America - are causing ripples in the online world of tape traders, fans for whom a trickle of studio albums by their favorite artists isn't enough.
Why did the RIAA single out this site - not much different from thousands of others on the Net, where traders post their "lists" in hopes of expanding their collections - threatening the site's owner with a five-year jail sentence and a US$250,000 fine for copyright infringement?
Unlike several Pearl Jam fan sites shut down by RIAA threats in recent months, the site - which was run by a university staffer who asked not to be identified - never featured advance, unauthorized copies of studio releases. The site was devoted strictly to the trading of high-quality concert recordings, some of which were recorded by the staffer himself, a Bruce Springsteen aficionado well-respected by other online traders.
His troubles began a few weeks ago, when email arrived from someone in Washington, DC, who said they wanted to conduct a trade. The particular kind of exchange requested was what is known in trading circles as a "newbie trade," newbie being the term for someone who is just getting started in the world of trading, and who thus usually cannot offer a swap of one show for another.
Newbie trades often involve the trading of one live recording for one or two blank tapes, the extra blank being the payment for the trader's time and effort in copying the tape. Most traders, obviously, would rather enlarge their collections than trade for blanks, but when a trader's collection reaches a certain level of comprehensiveness, there's not much out there left to trade. At that point, many traders retire from the circuit, or only trade with other connoisseurs for extreme rarities. Other traders - wanting to give something back to the trading community - make the fruits of their years of hunting and gathering available to newbies.
The university staffer says he spent up to 25 hours a week "spinning" tapes, many of them for newbies. The sheer volume of mail moving through his house - blank cassettes, self-addressed bubble-wrap envelopes, postage - became overwhelming.
"People would send me boxes of 100 blanks and ask me to make them 50 tapes," he recalls. "I was trading with people all over the world."
Finally, he decided to streamline the operation by asking newbies to send him $6 for one tape, instead of two blanks and return postage. He didn't make any profit, he says, and his wife was happier with the reduced volume of mail. "I thought I was helping everyone," he says.
To the RIAA, however, a Web site proffering unauthorized recordings for cash, even with no profit margin, smells like a professional bootlegging operation. In the eyes of the group's Anti-Piracy Unit, the site was a "commercial operation." The staffer maintains that his site was run purely "to spread the music."
The issue became even more complex in December, with the passage of the No Electronic Theft Act, designed to boost penalties for illegal copying of software and other intellectual property - including concert recordings and videos - for "financial gain." For traders, one particularly unsettling section of the law defines "financial gain" as "the receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works."
So is tape trading now illegal by definition - even trades where no money changes hands?
Yes and no. Director Steve D'Onofrio says the Anti-Piracy Unit looks at the scale of trading involved. "One individual trading with one individual is not a problem," he says.
The RIAA's position "has been to focus on commercial businesses where there is blatant copyright infringement," D'Onofrio says, singling out MPEG archive sites where unauthorized recordings are uploaded and downloaded directly from the Net - especially sites offering studio material before the release date.
So can old-school snail-mail traders relax? Not quite. When a trader posts his or her list to the Web, D'Onofrio says, they approach the "very thin line" between commercial sites and non-commercial sites.
In D'Onofrio's view, when a trader puts his list online, "then it's not just one person trading a tape. The entire world can get on the Internet. It's a much larger problem." The RIAA has also decided to target .edu sites, which it believes are hotbeds of copyright infringement and marketing of unauthorized recordings - "particularly universities that allow students to develop their own Web sites," D'Onofrio says.
Thickening the plot, the RIAA regards newbie trades of one show for two blanks as a kind of profiteering.
Most online traders, however, will not wake up tomorrow morning and find RIAA letters in their mailboxes, as that Springsteen collector did, which resulted in the university taking down his site and stripping him of his email address.
D'Onofrio says the RIAA usually will not move forward with an investigation until it has a signed affidavit from the artist to do so. Though some artists discourage all trading of unofficial recordings, others - like Phish, Widespread Panic, and the Allman Brothers - encourage online tape trading as a way of building their audience.
"Arguably, if there were no live tapes, people who wanted to hear Phish live would be forced to buy the albums. But the audience would be far smaller," observes Shelly Culbertson, ticketing and Internet manager for Phish, which has released two live albums in the past three years, despite the fact that there are hundreds of live Phish tapes available from traders on the Net.
Culbertson believes the band is "actively accommodating" tapers and traders with special tapers' seats at concerts, and said that non-interference with fan Web sites like phish.net, has been "more effective, from a publicity point of view, than radio and MTV."
Rich Breton, an online Springsteen trader with over 200 hours of live performances in his collection, thinks the RIAA should draw firmer distinctions between traders who are circulating the music for the love of it, and those who are in the game for profit.
"When it comes down to newbie trades, there should be some sort of guidelines to allow personal use," Breton says. Most of the traders he knows make a "huge distinction" between pre-release copies of studio material and live tapes, he says.
Besides, Breton observes, "Anyone I know who trades already has all the official releases, and if they're really into it, they even have the import CDs with special extra tracks."
While the RIAA's D'Onofrio allows that small-scale traders have "not been a major issue up to now," he says, "the Net changes everything."
