Heat Turned Up on Digital Music Pirates

In its biggest antipiracy action, Geffen Records shuts down more than 100 sites that carried illegal copies of its music. The pirates say they're just promoting the music - and that they're fighting high prices.

In the vast thicket of the Net, a community has formed around the exchange of MP3 songs - CD-quality digital files that anyone can download and listen to. The recording industry isn't taking kindly to having its hits pirated, and in recent weeks Geffen Records has expanded an offensive to shut down FTP sites engaged in the trade.

Although everyone agrees that Geffen is within its rights to take on the pirates - it has been waging a quiet battle with them since early last year - the latest campaign has the MP3 community up in arms. As the MP3 traders see it, the record industry drove them to piracy - they're simply music fans reacting to outrageous prices.

"You saw it coming, from a mile away, but it begs a bigger question. Why are people doing this?" asks Michael Robertson, the president of the MP3.com site. "It's ridiculous to spend $16 on a CD if all you want is one song. The music industry is making a bucketful of money."

There are thousands of FTP sites around the Net, many maintained by high school or college students who use the freely available MP3 (or MPEG-1 Layer 3 compression format) software to turn their CD collections into digital computer files. Those files, which at 3 megabytes are one-sixteenth the size of CD singles but retain their CD sound quality, are being traded around the Web, played on computers, and used to promote the MP3 format. But the copying is illegal, and since the files can be easily burned into new CDs, the recording industy is wary about letting the practice continue.

"I like MP3s because I like music, and when I listen to music that I like it makes me want to share with others why the song is so great," says "Blex", who runs the MP3 directory that Geffen targeted. "MP3s make sharing your favorite songs possible."

The latest crackdown was sparked several weeks ago when Geffen's director of technology, Jim Griffin, came across Blex's directory, a site that lists places to find MP3 music and claims 10,000 visitors a day.

Geffen began sending letters to more than 100 listed sites, informing owners that their FTP sites were illegal and requesting the removal of all full-length songs. This culminated in a mass shutdown last week when the majority of the sites were taken down by network administrators - in some cases university officials - also contacted by Geffen.

Geffen declined comment for this story. Last July, Forbes magazine quoted Griffin as saying: "The reason we go after pirates is to clean up the Internet for commerce, otherwise anarchy reigns. They're not hard to find: We just plug "MP3" into a search engine and go after the first site we come to. Every pirate we've gone after, we've caught."

Although the recent MP3 bust is apparently the largest, the music industry's campaign has been gathering momentum for awhile.

The Recording Industry Association of America has been working aggressively on behalf of member companies since early '97. Armed with a new federal law, the No Electronic Theft Act, the association is trying to track down the biggest MP3 piracy sites, even going after sites that aren't profiting from the piracy. The trade group employs three full-time staffers to chase pirates - and has shut down more than 250 in the last year.

But the closely knit MP3ers are rallying in the face of Geffen's offensive and say that they've been unfairly targeted. In addition to providing what amounts to a sampling service, they argue that MP3 can reach only a limited audience. The smaller FTP sites that were shut down last week, they say, were hurting no one.

"The way I look at it, I was promoting their artists like any other radio station," says Will Komassa, a University of Wisconsin student who was forced to turn off his modest country-free FTP site after Geffen called his university's network investigator last weekend. "To do what he did is akin to bitching at every eighth grader who taped 'Mmmbop' off the radio - pretty lame. The only difference between them and us is that we are 'rebellious' or something."

"I don't buy that argument that this is the only way they can hear a song without buying a CD," responds Frank Creighton, associate director of the recording association's antipiracy division. "What other products out there can you get for free? It's naive to think that this stuff should be given away for free."

Still, MP3 proponents argue that at least they are promoting the standard, while the recording industry is lagging in embracing digital encoding. Creighton says it's inevitable that companies will start selling songs online on a track-by-track basis, but he adds that "until the pirate market gets addressed, what's the incentive for the companies to enter the arena, if songs they're going to charge for are available elsewhere for free?"

In the interim, Blex has removed his Web site, to protect those FTP sites that were left. One MP3 fan who was shut down has begun a Boycott Geffen campaign and says he's received hundreds of emails of support. But most of all, the MP3 movement is moving even further underground, backing away from the Web in favor of IRC, ICQ, and secret mailing lists.

"FTP sites are within Geffen's rights to take care of by any means necessary, but the point is that neither Geffen, Virgin, Sony, etc. can put an end to the piracy of near CD-quality music, whether it be MP3 or AAC or anything else," emails Spyed, who runs the MP3 site DimensionMusic. "Sure, get rid of FTP sites, but you can't get rid of day-to-day chatting on IRC, or ICQ, or take down all FTP sites, for that matter. You can move a site to a new IP address every day. It's impossible to track down the whole world."