It's about the technology, stupid

Posted April 13, 2004 at 01:25 EDT under news.

There is a weekend tradition around the old casa del mono whereby ecogrrl and I make sure we tune into CBC News: Sunday to recap the week's events. Recently we saw the segment (04 April 2004) discussing the legal aspects of file-sharing in Canada, which was probably prompted by the Canadian music industry's recent failure to takes steps to criminalize file-sharing activities.

The segment had a lot of sound-bites from various punters, pundits and lawyers discussing whether or not file-sharers were stealing music and whether or not current Canadian fair-use laws needed to be amended to criminalize file-sharing in Canada. It even had Steven Page, of Barenaked Ladies fame, smugly suggesting that file-sharing, if left unchecked, would be sure to force him into a job at Tim Horton's.

get a job!

While I'm not sure that introducing Mr. Page to a few months of service-industry work would be all that harmful, it is highly unlikely that a well-educated and reasonably talented white suburban adult man would end up working at Tim Horton's. This is certainly not to say that employment at one of Canada's famous doughnut and coffee franchises is not a fine and noble way to earn one's living.

I'm assuming that musicians that allude to being forced out of work by dastardly file-sharers are really talking about making sure that units-sold stay nice and high on new releases; allowing them to collect the royalties they've earned, and keeping the music execs happy so they do not get dropped in the middle of a 5-7 record deal.

Fair enough.

However, this discussion about file-sharing neglected to even mention what I think is the most important aspects of the problem, and one we forget at our peril: technology.

it's all about the technology

Now, I'm not talking about the various file-sharing systems people are using to trade music (and other media). I'm not even talking about the Internet, or the growing use of home computers and high-speed Internet access. These are all really secondary to the issue of file-sharing. I'm talking about the actual lossy compression techniques used to squish songs down to an easily transportable and storable size.

Nobody seems to be mentioning that sharing music really depends on the ability to transform an original-source recording into another media format. Traditionally this has been referred to as copying, though until now the second-generation copies were done in the analog domain. However, there is no getting around the fact that creating an MP3 or equivalent digital second-generation copy of a recording is what makes file-sharing possible.

For example, nobody seems to be sharing bit-for-bit copies of media on the Internet. I've rarely, if ever, seen an AIFF, AIFF-C or WAV versions of popular music on file-sharing networks. I've never seen people offer or request files encoded for use on DAT or Minidisc equipment, both of which were certain to ruin the music industry forever when they were introduced.

No, it is the very fact that typical file-sharing requires that songs be encoded in a manner that typically saves only 1/16^th to 1/25^th of the original material to make the resulting file small enough to pass around the Internet, and store on a home computer system.

just a copy

The majority of digital copies of original recordings are, therefore, just that: copies. The only thing different about digital copies is that you get the benefits of (typically) keeping the recording in the digital domain and copies that do not degrade any further. An MP3 is still a copy, regardless of the near CD-quality rubric used to describe the various compression techniques, bit-lengths and sample rates.

Mathematically, what we are doing is attempting to musically extract just enough information from a stream of information so that the intelligence can be recovered. Shannon, et al, would be proud.

What I'm suggesting is that we stop considering MP3s (&etc.) as some kind of perfect or equal duplication of an original source. When done right it is somewhat good-enough for listening on computer playback equipment. It is not equal in any way to an original source recording, and is almost guaranteed to sound terrible on modest audio equipment. Current compression techniques can, and do, add all kinds of sonic distortion, noise and audio artefacts to these second-gen copies.

Engineers have a saying: Good, fast or cheap. Choose any two. You can't have all three, and most people who care about music find that the songs they grab from file-sharing networks are certainly fast and cheap enough, but they ain't very good.

I suggest that the media found on file-sharing networks is really no better, in many fundamental ways, than any other second-generation copy like cassettes or radio. I'm concerned that the music business is driven almost completely by minimizing the costs involved in delivering music to consumers. I'm concerned that these new delivery methods will only take into consideration the necessities of getting the biggest singles of the biggest artists to market, without any concern for fidelity. I'm concerned that anything resembling fidelity will eventually be considered a premium, and offered to consumers at a premium cost.

which one is pink?

Given the history of popular music, it is not too difficult to imagine how attractive cost-free delivery of singles to most consumers is to the music business. How attractive is the creation of new premium markets which offer nothing much better than todays CDs (or DVDs) at premium prices? If I was a record exec, I'd love to know that some new media formats can easily be locked to specific playback devices, requiring additional purchases for use in home stereos, computers and car stereos. And all without potential additional delivery costs or even significant royalties paid to artists.

Canadians have long had the right to copy certain works for personal use. We have a long tradition of allowing consumers fair use of, and reasonable access to, copyrighted materials. The notion is that the law needs to protect the rights of consumers, who are the ones funding the whole enterprise, while allowing trade to exist in reasonable manner. We certainly would not want to allow all copyrighted material to instantly fall into the public-domain. Similarly, we should not just allow the music business to set the standards by which a substandard copy can be considered protected, and reasonable use of copyright material criminalized.

We need to consider what the music business and big-name artists really mean when they accuse file-sharers of stealing. We should not take these arguments at face value and make sure we consider the technology that is making this possible in the first place. Otherwise, we risk having the technology used against us. The question to ask might be, will modern file sharing tech hurt the industry any more than radio, cassettes or DAT? All of these were, at one time, warned to be responsible for the certain death of music when introduced.

what i said

What follows is my response to the CBC programme in question, which I am led to believe may be part of a follow-up show. I've included it here, in toto, just in case my arguments are presented in a way I consider unfair or misleading.

Re: Sunday Broadcast 04 April 2004, "Internet Downloading" segment

Almost every traditional media source has neglected to discuss one of the most important aspects about digital media sharing. This neglected aspect of file-sharing is technology.

Not the technology that makes it directly possible to share songs or movies, but the the technology that allows a very large amount of information (i.e., a song) to be passed around in mere minutes via something called "compression". The kinds of compression used, or the name we give it (MP3, ACC, Ogg) is not significant to this discussion.

This technology is important to this discussion in one very important way: the copy of a song that is passed around is significantly different than the same song as found on a store-bought CD. This is because, by and large, songs transformed to make them easily shared are compressed using something called "lossy" compression. This does exactly what it sounds like it does. In very clever ways, a song or movie is made much smaller (in terms of computer storage) by throwing away extra or redundant information. In many cases the resulting file contains 1/16th or 1/24th of the original recording, regardless of any tricks used to make the resulting file sound more musical upon playback.

Many people feel that the quality of any song manipulated in this manner is no better than making a copy of a recording to some other traditional medium. There is a long tradition in popular music of making "mixed tapes" or copying CDs and records for friends. It was, and is, never expected to replace the original source. It was a trade-off of quality for convenience, and digital copies are no different in this respect. Current Canadian law accepts and respects this kind of personal use of copyrighted material.

Any digitally copied music is, by definition, substandard to the original source. The fact that the copy is in the digital domain does not change this fact. This is regardless of any terms that record executives, artists or listeners want to apply to the method used to create the copy. That is, saying something is "near CD quality" is no guarantee of any such thing. It only guarantees that the degradation of quality will be different than the distortion that one expects from traditional analog copies, such as cassette tapes.

Many listeners agree that compressed digital copies as currently found on many file-sharing networks is of much lower-quality than any original consumer-level source.

I suspect that if anything is hurt by file-sharing as it is currently implemented, it will be the markets around a few large artists bought by a large segment of the popular music consumer. The disposable pop stars, and the (generally young) crowd that consume their products are probably going to continue doing what they've always done: make copies of the chart-busting singles any way they can. According to music industry studies, this demographic does not care to own a physical copy of an album. They prefer to own singles, and will cheerfully accept sub-standard copies for playback on substandard equipment.

Many others will continue to use digital copies and file-sharing in the traditional manner. By sharing fair-to-middling copies of specific works for preview or introduction or convenience. These people will continue to buy the higher-fidelity copies directly from the music labels for playback on traditional equipment. This market tends to purchase music steadily throughout an artist's career, and will probably not accept substandard copies, regardless of whether or not these copies are supplied by the record companies.

By criminalizing file-sharing, law-makers would be criminalizing actions that have a lot of benefit to consumers; all without doing much to solve the problem (if it exists) of poor sales for a few big-name artists. It does pave the way for easy and cheap distribution of low-fidelity recordings by the record companies, with a premium for those consumers who want to actually buy a CD. All without increasing the royalties paid to artists for "units sold", I bet. Pretty sweet deal.

Proving significant benefit is crucial to allowing for "fair use" for consumers. We ignore these important technical arguments at our peril.

Perhaps Steven Page feels that file-sharers are stealing from him. I feel the same about risking considerable money on a Barenaked Ladies release on CD, being coerced into accepting a 128-bit MP3 as "CD Quality" or potentially forced into buying multiple copies of a song from his record company for use on my CD player, car stereo and personal listening device.