TheWorldJournal.com - Entertainment

MP3 - Does That Hurt?
By Harold Mitts (the Internet expert), TheWorldJournal.com

Napster is only a mediocre victory for RIAA in the fight against piracy on the internet. The victory will never be won for the record industry or the artists who support them. Napster is only one player in a huge underground network of piracy and corruption. It happens to just be a martyr and may go down, however the piracy business will, and does survive, in fact it will only serve to cause those who have decided that mp3's are the way to get their music, to find alternative means of obtaining copies of the files they want.

There are a plethora of opportunities for the novice, not to mention the expert internet user to get just about anything on the web they are looking for. I personally know of many sites where I can get entire albums, not just single tracks. That is the funny part to me, that the RIAA would even go after Napster. I believe (and not many novices would agree), that Napster is a waste of time for the serious individual interested in pirated music because they only offer one track at a time. You need to know all of the song title or use www.cddb.com to get the list, then try to find them all (if you want full albums-and most people do). Then you are faced with the task of getting them all recorded at the same bitrate so the sound consisted, as most pirates have ripped them at a varying number of encoding speeds to save disk space, or to preserve sound quality. The obvious alternative (not to the novice) is to seek out FTP sites who offer the entire album, all encoded at the same time and all from the same source.

There are even web sites that will offer this to you. Generally 99% of either of these are free to users, but the sites earn money from displaying advertisements. Often these ads are pornographic, how appropriate though, for pirated music... the two seem to go together, and often those are the only banner campaigns that will accept applicants who's sites are based on piracy.

There are sites (many) that will point you to these FTP servers and will even give the novice a 'FTP for dummies' section (as FTP isn't the most user friendly for first timers). Check out www.cdrip.com or www.oth.net or also do a search on www.lycos.com with the keywords 'ftp mp3' and see what you can find. The FTP game is just that, a game, and many of the people hosting the sites are not in the mood to answer user questions or offer help. They usually get thousands of people per day visiting their sites and they generally run them from their own personal computers, so they are hard to keep going reliably and are often run by teenagers who do it for a while then move on to bigger things, or just get the music they wanted and drop out of the scene.

The best way to find music via an FTP server is to get an FTP client like CuteFTP or BulletProof. They are both free trial versions which will run fine after the trial period expires. They have built in search engines to make your pirate adventure very easy once you learn the controls.

It doesn't stop at music files with FTP clients either, many of the same people who build FTP sites also serve up some more elicit files too, such as pornography and software, both of any type imaginable. Often these sites are harder to find, and generally you need to trade them something they are looking for. These people have been in the business for a while longer and generally aren't interested in music for trade, as they probably already have it or are not interested because music files tend to consume hard disk space which is desired for pirated software applications or games.

So, the RIAA and Larse Ulriche (A self appointed spokesperson from the band Metallica) have an insurmountable task ahead of them if they expect to shut down piracy of music on the net. My suggestion would be for them to re-evaluate their position and decide if their energy is best spent fighting a loosing battle. Instead they should concentrate on developing licensed downloadable music from the web. The technology is there, but it just needs to be expounded upon. Imagine if the record industry got behind a project to provide free music on the internet. Sites like Sony and Time Warner could make even more money than they already do. If users had to view ads when they downloaded music, or (I hate to think it, but it may happen) every time they play a 'free' file they downloaded. They would be able to get royalties just like they get from the radio stations. The success would be greater exponentially bar far than any lawsuit can ever bring to their greedy executives, and it would be easier obtained. The industry would be happy and more so, the entire music audience would be thrilled at a reliable service where they could get what they already do with little or no hassle. The RIAA needs to wake up, stop being the whining little kid who can't keep up, and come to the modern world, or it will continue to be ignored and left behind. Downloadable music is here to stay, they need to get their business staff on task, not their legal staff.

© September 11, 2000

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