LOS ANGELES -- Piracy is the red herring of the digital music distribution debate and the music industry is fishing for trouble with SDMI, the head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told music industry executives on Wednesday.
"I get the sense that wrong questions are being asked," EFF executive director Tara Lemmey said in a keynote address to the Digital Distribution and the Music Industry '99 conference.
"How do we lock these rights up? I think the real question is how do we ease the function of payment. People don't normally steal things that are easy to pay for. Combating piracy means making it easier for people to pay."
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By locking up Internet music distribution, said Lemmey, "We're setting up a society of distrust.
"SDMI [for Secured Digital Music Initiative] is a vicious lockdown. The more you lock things down, the more you encourage people to steal. The technology assumes you're going to steal something. That's not how we normally work."
Consumers, she predicted, would lash back against restrictive models. "There's nothing like an oppression to set up a good rebellion."
Over the break, Jeremy Silver, the vice president of New Media at EMI, disagreed with Lemmey's position.
"I'm not sure they really know what SDMI is," said Silver. "It's unfortunate. SDMI's aspiration is to create open standards to let people lay whatever they want on whatever they want. That's all."
Lemmey's philosophy that companies should allow unfettered access as a way of encouraging honesty, said Silver, is naïve.
"That's like arguing that it makes more sense to not give people car keys because most people are honest."
Indie record label owner and general manager Jeff Price of SpinART records, a New York-based label releasing music by such artists as ex-Pixies guitarist Frank Black, violently disagreed.
"My reaction to this is that the SDMI is full of shit," he said.
Price said the Net has leveled the recording industry playing field, giving indie labels like his the opportunity to compete with big guns like Sony. The big five record companies, he says, are scared.
"What they're trying to do with SDMI is control the direct threat to their business. If I don't need to go to them it's a threat, we've cut them off at the knees. So they created a problem -- pirating -- that needs a solution: SDMI."
"I'm a record company owner and I don't think pirating is a threat. I actually think pirating has increased my sales."
