File Sharing for Smarties
Most of the articles, treatises, and rants about file sharing don’t explain why file sharing has worked so successfully for music. The sections below explain the essential parts of music file sharing, and why it works.
- Computers, the Internet and File Sharing
- Digital Sound Encoding and Compression
- The Vending Machine Problem and Other Human Factors
- Categories of File Sharing Content and Their Economic Effects
Computers, the Internet, and File Sharing
The Internet is a worldwide network that can be accessed cheaply by millions of people using relatively inexpensive computers. The technologies of the Internet, computers, and file sharing programs enable file sharing because of the following factors:
- No "special" equipment is needed to access the Internet besides a standard computer. Imagine a specialized box like your cable box: You can’t do much with your cable box besides getting a TV signal and changing channels even though it's on an information network. Computers are infinitely flexible devices that can be asked to do specialized tasks like file sharing. Loading software to make your computer do specialized tasks is easy. Compare this to trying to get your cable box to do anything but change channels and activate pay-per-view.
- The current consumer-grade Internet access economic model does not have "metered" charges for bandwidth. It’s unlikely that people would be willing to "share" files if it cost money each time strangers downloaded a file. Since the Internet access model is not metered, like power or gas is, no one considers it an issue to share their entire music collection for the world to hear.
- The Internet infrastructure is a "stupid network." The Internet will blindly send any data you want where you ask, efficiently and without central control. The original network models were all smart networks (think of the telephone network.) Thus, the companies that created it had a lot of control over who could use it, what kind of data went over it, and how it was used. If the phone companies or the Internet providers had that kind of control over the Internet, the RIAA would have forced them all to shut down file sharing long ago. (Information on stupid networks is in a seminal article about the internet here.)
- Peer to Peer sharing no longer needs a central server to work. Peer to peer sharing is now just a network of computers that can locate and copy files to and from each other. These networks are so distributed that shutting them down would mean shutting off tens of thousands, or even millions of different computers. Centralized services like the original Napster could be shut off at the source. Even better, these services will now chop these file into parts so that a single computer can get a single file from multiple sources, which makes for a very speedy download process, even if each particular source has limited bandwidth.
- A computer makes perfect copies of data. Imagine if there were a way to instantaneously distribute copies of cassettes around the world in the same manner as MP3 files. If this was how file sharing worked, the later-generation copies of the original sound recordings would become so poor that the system would fall apart. The ability to make perfect copies allows file trading to succeed. The fact that they are copies is important too, because when an individual shares music via file sharing, they don't lose access to their music, which is what would happen if they lent out physical CDs.
- Peer to Peer services default to "opt-in". These services, once they're installed, default to an "opt-in" setting, and most people probably don't know how, or don't bother to turn it off. Thus, people end up sharing all of the files they have, getting access to a world full of music, but also sharing their own.
Digital Sound Encoding and Compression
Digital encoding and sound compression are two important parts of file sharing. Without the ability to turn the music file into data and to compress the data, file sharing could not have even begun.
Digital sound encoding: Encoding music turns the sound data that represents music into a stream of digital data, which makes it possible to be transferred over a network and to be infinitely copied. This digital sound encoding is so integral to file sharing systems that the ability is almost invisible. But this capability to divorce the data that represents music from physical media (such as CDs) is the largest change from the past. It’s this concept that the music industry and the courts have had the hardest time dealing with, since the physical media that the music is on is no longer important. We care about the content now.. Without encoding, the best option we had in the past was to make physical copies of our music using a cassette or CD. Transferring our music meant handing it to someone, a very inefficient way to transfer the data.
Sound compression: Compression is the other technology that makes music viable for file trading. Compression seems simple, since we now encode and compress CDs with a few clicks of a mouse. But compression has more components than it at first seems:
- Sound compression makes files small enough to easily transfer them on the Internet. With compression, the 50-100 MB raw sound files that are on a CD can be compressed into an average of a 3 to 6 megabyte file. These are easily sent in minutes over the Internet with the current "broadband" connections.
- The most popular sound compression formats are all lossy formats. "Lossy" is a technical term that means that some of data is lost when a file is compressed. For music, this means that some of the frequencies are approximated. While some of the sound quality is lost, most people consider the result to be "good enough" such that it’s not even discussed anymore as a disadvantage. The convenience of the smaller files has far outweighed the loss in sound quality in people’s minds, although most musicians can tell the difference between a compressed file and a real CD track.
- The MP3 format has become the recent de-facto standard for sound compression. Most major sound programs and audio devices read the MP3 format. Without the availability of MP3 players, file sharing could not have taken off.
One note of interest regarding the MP3 format is that it is patented and owned by Fraunhaufer IIS, a German concern. While they don’t charge listeners for using the format, they do charge the manufacturers of every software-based and hardware-based MP3 player. Also, MP3 is not the only form of sound compression. There are many competing formats, owned by companies such as Apple (AAC), Microsoft (WMA), Real (RAM), as well as many others too numerous to mention.
Finally, one compression standard that has attracted great interest lately is called Ogg Vorbis, which is a free and open standard. Sound critics have reviewed Ogg Vorbis as superior to MP3, and on par or better than WMA, MP4, and AAC. Its also compresses data better than the MP3 format, resulting in smaller files. In the future, if Fraunhaufer, Apple, Microsoft, and other proprietary companies get too greedy with their royalties, you may see the new OGG format come into prominence. You can listen to this format with most major software players, and some hardware players are beginning to read it as well. Ogg Vorbis is already being used in many commercial devices such as elevators, telephones, and others that need to play compressed sounds, since it doesn’t cost anything to create a player that will play this open and free format. (See http://www.vorbis.com for more info.)
The Vending Machine Problem and Other Human Factors
It’s hard to argue that getting music off the Internet that you haven't paid for is anything but illegal, but the major labels want you to believe that it's the same as walking out of a record store with swiped CD's hidden in your coat. Although both are crimes, it's just not the same thing. Most importantly, it's not the same thing in the mind of an average person.
The human issue comes down to what we call the vending machine problem: If an average person came across a vending machine that was broken, which would give free candy for any button pushed, they would probably take a candy bar. And there are a significant percentage of people that would take lots of candy bars. If you were in the business of selling candy, you would see this as people stealing your inventory. Most of those people would say that if you didn't want them to steal your candy, you should make sure that your machine was working right. Of course, the real reason people would take the candy is because they know that they are not face to face with the ones that they are stealing from (as they would be in a store, stealing an item from a shelf), and they probably guess that they can't get caught. The key is that they are not face-to-face with the ones from whom they are stealing. How many people would rip your band's CD and copy it without paying if you were there, with them, in the room?
The Internet is not completely anonymous, as the RIAA lawsuits show, but it's close enough to anonymous that it has the illusion of it. So the vending machine problem applies. But there's another factor that makes it even easier for people to consider this activity. If they steal an album out of a music store, that store has one less physical CD to sell. But if they "steal" a copy of a song from the internet, no one has less music than they had before. A person who is file sharing does let someone use a little bandwidth, but there's no other effect on them. Hence, most people don't mind sharing their music. While most record companies call this a direct lost sale in their statistics about file sharing, the economic loss is not that certain, nor straightforward. A detailed discussion of this topic will be handled in the economic effects section.
There's one aspect to morality of file sharing that isn't often discussed. While it is unfair to the owners of the recordings for people to download music without paying for it, file sharing seems to have a self-contained ethic all its own. This can be boiled down to: "I don't mind sharing what I have in order to get what other people have managed to collect." It's got a certain ring of fairness to it regarding a quid pro quo between peer to peer users, and from that standpoint, right or wrong, people feel that they are entitled to do this.
The vending machine issue, along with the fact that copying music is very unlike stealing in the traditional sense, is why most people feel little risk from file sharing. But there are also human factors at work that contribute to the desire for file sharing. Here are two important ones:
- Out of the bulk of recorded music, which is over a century of material, only a small percentage of it is available for purchase because most is out of print. It’s not cost-effective for the music labels to print a short run of an obscure album. But many people still want these works, and in many cases file sharing is the only way to get them.
- The idea of a "jukebox in the sky" with most all recorded music available within a few mouse clicks is an extremely powerful one. It sounds like a science fiction story, but this technology exists today, and it’s accessible to everyone with a computer and an Internet connection. People will not cease using this technology to wait for the music industry to create a crippled, expensive version of this capability that will likely have an incomplete music library.
In general, the risk is very low for individuals who share files, even with the RIAA's lawsuits as a disincentive. More importantly, the benefits of file sharing are quite high. The kindergarten ideal of "sharing" is almost idealized in file sharing, considering that you can share you music with anyone at all without depriving yourself of your own copy. With access to almost all of the world's music on these services, the reasons these services have been so successful are easy to understand.
The Categories of File Sharing Content and Their Economic Effects
There is more than one type of file sharing, and looking at these types gives a better understanding of what goes on during file sharing. It also gives a clue to its economic effect. The real picture is more complex than the simplistic "stealing music" refrain that the RIAA keeps promulgating. In fact, there are many types of file sharing that are positive as well as negative.
The best explanation of the different types of shared content that is by Lawrence Lessig in his book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology And The Law To Lock Down Culture And Control Creativity. We highly recommend reading this book, which is available in bookstores, but also for free off of Lawrence Lessig's website. This book has one of the clearest perspectives on the concept of "piracy," as well as the intersection of creativity, copyright, and culture.
The categories listed below, which are quoted from Lessig's book, are the best explanation of the different kinds of file sharers. These categories provide a clear insight into why people want to file share in the first place, and the different types of sharing that they do. We've talked about the technical capabilities that allow sharing in other sections; this section talks about what kinds of data are shared on this technical framework.
Lessig's categories are so well thought out that we're going to share his definitions here:
“File sharers distribute different kinds of content. We can divide these into four types.
A. There are some who use sharing networks as substitutes for purchasing content. Thus, when a new Madonna CD is released, rather than buying the CD, these users simply take it. We might quibble about whether everyone who takes it would actually have bought it if sharing didn’t make it available for free. Most probably wouldn’t have, but clearly there are some who would. The latter are the target of category A: users who download instead of purchasing.
B. There are some who use sharing networks to sample music before purchasing it. Thus, a friend sends another friend an MP3 of an artist he’s not heard of. The other friend then buys CDs by that artist. This is a kind of targeted advertising, quite likely to succeed. If the friend recommending the album gains nothing from a bad recommendation, then one could expect that the recommendations will actually be quite good. The net effect of this sharing could increase the quantity of music purchased.
C. There are many who use sharing networks to get access to copyrighted content that is no longer sold or that they would not have purchased because the transaction costs off the Net are too high. This use of sharing networks is among the most rewarding for many. Songs that were part of your childhood but have long vanished from the marketplace magically appear again on the network. (One friend told me that when she discovered Napster, she spent a solid weekend "recalling" old songs. She was astonished at the range and mix of content that was available.)
For content not sold, this is still technically a violation of copyright, though because the copyright owner is not selling the content anymore, the economic harm is zero—the same harm that occurs when I sell my collection of 1960s 45-rpm records to a local collector.
D. Finally, there are many who use sharing networks to get access to content that is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give away.
How do these different types of sharing balance out?
Let’s start with some simple but important points. From the perspective of the law, only type D sharing is clearly legal. From the perspective of economics, only type A sharing is clearly harmful. Type B sharing is illegal but plainly beneficial. Type C sharing is illegal, yet good for society (since more exposure to music is good) and harmless to the artist (since the work is not otherwise available). So how sharing matters on balance is a hard question to answer—and certainly much more difficult than the current rhetoric around the issue suggests.”
Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity / Lawrence Lessig. 2004
The economic effects of these categories of file sharing is a tangled, difficult topic, but one that needs to be discussed here. The music industry, of course, focuses on the subset of category A sharers that would have bought an album, but download the music instead. We do not wish to compare the numerous, inevitably controversial studies that debate whether the net economic effect of file sharing is positive or negative, but we do want to give a more complete picture of the various effects that these types of file sharing has on sales. Again, we want to emphasize that the issues are not as straightforward as they may appear.
To put this into more of a perspective: type B and type C sharing are helpful to the copyright holders yet often aren't discussed. Type B sharing helps by exposing people to music before they buy it, which might increase sales. Type C sharing doesn't take away any revenue, and helps the copyright holder in that it renews interest in artists that might have gone out of print. It might create new sales opportunities if there is a resurgence of interest in an out-of-print artist. With digital distribution, it may be possible to generate new sales of an old album that is rediscovered without even having to go through a reprint of the physical album.
But one other thing that is rarely discussed is that type A sharing is also helpful to copyright holders, even if a particular person doesn't buy an album at all. The reason for this is that a band in today's world is actually a brand. Take Britney Spears, for example. Imagine a 13-year-old girl happily playing her downloaded MP3s on her computer and MP3 player. She hasn't spent a cent on the music, but look around her room, and you might see a Britney poster, Britney T-shirts, and Britney fashion dolls, and possibly tickets to a Britney concert. In general, it is a too-narrow view to define file sharing's economic effect as being solely about the recorded music.
As a final note, we suggest that indie bands take advantage of the type D sharing, and make their own works available on these file sharing networks. We explain why later in this section. But part of the justification is the concept of a band as a brand which indies can leverage. Your show draws, merchandise sales, and even CD sales may be helped by file sharing your own music.