, shut down by lawsuits, is reconstituting itself as a paid subscription service. But file swapping is thriving, as new enterprises skate around the characteristics that made Napster vulnerable to .
The new guys rely on P2P trading to eliminate any central server on which unauthorized material might reside and to enable them to claim innocence of its transfer. They also promise to yank the accounts of copyright violators, if informed by mail, of course, with full particulars and documentation of each instance of abuse.
The old Casablanca line comes to mind – operators of these sites are , to discover that copyrighted music changes hands. But 24.2 million copies of ’s have been downloaded, and similar swapping programs are at the top of the popularity list at . In August 2001, an estimated three billion files were downloaded. Not just music is involved, but anything that can be digitized.
More lawsuits are underway; 25 music and movie companies recently a bunch of the new swap sites. But this is a limited strategy. There is no way, legally or practically, to suppress file sharing software, which has many , or to suppress websites that can locate anywhere in the world to provide a link between users.
IP companies are also establishing their own music distribution services as an alternative to the pirate sites. This too is difficult. Music is a of publication, performance, and reproduction rights, with each varying according to the technology involved, and negotiations are slow.
Technical problems are also formidable. Whenever some ingenious programmer develops copy protection, an equally ingenious hacker breaks it. Disks or digital files that can play on a variety of devices but cannot be copied may be a chimera. Lots of people seek it, and it may yet be found, but it is not here yet.
Moreover, current research efforts involve proprietary systems that would interlock the medium and the replay device. This raises a nightmare prospect of a plethora of competing, incompatible protection systems, or, equally alarming, of a monopoly by one super-successful innovator.
A draft Senate written by Disney Corp., would mandate that industry and government come up with a unified copy protection standard for use on all hardware. Other industry players are skeptical, fearing a repeat of the , in which an agreed-upon standard for DVDs was broken in seven lines of code. Government involvement could also stifle innovation and render any security holes unfixable.
Another option for IP holders is to take direct action. Software searches out copyrighted material on swap networks and downloads it, repeatedly and slowly, clogging the exchange network. say that IP companies are contemplating more intrusive action, such as invading other people’s computers to delete pirated materials, a step that would cause considerable uproar in the Internet community.
If other means fail, desperate IP owners could adopt severely limited systems, such as using encryption to create a CD, DVD, or file that can be played only on a specified, registered replay device. It is clear that the public would not like this; most people do not want to sit at a computer to listen to music, or be limited to any one device. However, a world in which each CD or DVD sells one copy, which is then cloned infinitely, is not one in which producers of IP will get the monetary returns needed to ply their trade. So the search for a solution goes on, with growing anxiety.