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Pandora's Box

(Published in the Metropolitan Computer Times, December 2001)

Like most things high-tech, MP3 is a great equalizer—it is either legal or illegal, it is accessible to a great mass of people regardless of social class, nationality or post-Sept. 11 worldview, it cuts through the bullshit set by those who came first and laid the first brick, like, say, the ones who earn the most money. Call me evil if you want but for people like me, who often don’t want to pay, it is manna from heaven. But for the gods of the industry, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for example, MP3 is a can of worms.

The high point of my day is flicking on my computer in the morning, listening to the faint whir that tells me those millions of transistors are waking up, then making those very important mouse clicks to check which MP3 files I have completed downloading and which are still queued up. Then I would enter new search strings—the name of some new artist I had read about in Pulp’s review, or the cool, new song I just chanced upon on MTV—and wait for the software to yield its results. Then I’d sit back, relax and wait, knowing that my musical desires are well taken care of.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the past few years, this morning ritual should be familiar to you, as it is in countless office cubicles, dorm rooms, or basement bureaus across the world. And at the center of this drama is the nifty digital audio file format called MP3 (MPEG 1, Layer 3), a technological trick that makes it possible to convert, store and share CD-quality music through the Internet—which, in turn, was first made possible by a free software called Napster. 

But Napster was so three years ago; mired in legal tangles for months with the Recording Industry Association of America over copyright issues, the once high-flyer was slowly taken over by other file trading services, like Kazaa (www.kazaa.com), Bearshare (www.bearshare.com)  and Morpheus (www.morpheus.com). While Napster was sleeping, about 300 other sites offering similar services have sprouted up—and by the sheer number of them, the top honchos at the RIAA slowly realize that what they did with Napster was what any fool did with the Hydra prior to Hercules—after cutting off a head, out grew two more. 

Well, that’s fine with me. After all, who would refuse a bunch of other free options? About three years ago, before the copyright infringement issue with the RIAA, I was frenziedly using Napster, my eyes glazed with greed as I sat before my PC quietly imagining those songs laughing their way to my hard drive. The novel ease of getting all those supposedly hard-to-find songs as painlessly as clicking a mouse button often left me half-believing (“What? The most popular folk song in Timbuktu is in my hard drive now? Are you sure?”).  

But when they let the dogs out, making Napster practically unusable, I swallowed my pride and cautiously trampled underfoot my supposed loyalty to Shawn Fanning’s creation. That was when I learned about I-mesh (www.i-mesh.com), another file trading service that not only includes MP3 but also video clips, software and images. Months later, someone told me about Morpheus, so I tried it. Then I discovered Audiogalaxy, which I promptly realized contained a whole lot more music files than anyone could handle. Unfortunately, the RIAA smelled blood and, armed with all the legal weapons any well-fed lawyer could conjure, promptly eviscerated Audiogalaxy’s servers, leaving nothing but a useless online shell. It was during that interminable darkness in my life when Kazaa came into the picture, and filled the void Audiogalaxy left. I am presently one of Kazaa’s incurable suckers, thank you very much. 

MP3’s lure lies in the fact that one of mankind’s best selling commodities—music—can be made free—thanks to the smart people at the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) who created the format. MPEG was also ultimately shortsighted; they foresaw neither the piracy threat nor the legal ramifications but instead focused on creating effective technology. In a way, as one analyst put it, they were like the scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project or the Seven Blind Men from Hindustan: each saw only a part of the whole and never realized the ultimate consequences when the separate parts finally agglomerate.

Yet, despite all the finger-pointing and blame-laying, I owe Napster and hundreds of kindred software a lot—they allowed me to discover new musical frontiers and made me and its millions of users realize that there is much about the world that is both beautiful and accessible. Through Napster (and now Kazaa), I have access to artists that are otherwise not available at local record stores; I have discovered Brazilian jazz, Antonio Carlos Jobim, the entire repertoire of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley and even a 1930s phenomenon named Edith Piaf.  

There is a whole world out there. And that world, for the RIAA and other similar regulating bodies, bleeds with nightmares, what with all the phantoms and demons lifting the lid off Pandora’s box has unleashed? But beyond music piracy, beyond the confusion regarding copyright limits and extensions lie signs of the inevitable changes that will sweep the entire world as new technologies, new protocols, new business strategies and distribution concepts emerge.  

The Information Age is really about information—the sort that controls and pulls the levers of power. It rings Alvin Toffler’s words a decade or so ago: that in a world increasingly dependent on information, the one who has the right information at the right time assumes de facto leadership—which is somehow answered by the CEO of another Napster-wannabe dotcom: What if killing Napster was killing the record industry’s only chance of a viable online strategy? 

The answer already sprouts by the hundreds with emerging waves of Napster competitors, one of them being the all-powerful, irrepressible, unstoppable, RIAA-defying Kazaa, whose candy-colored interface now tells me I’ve just completed downloading a Monty Python song. I run Winamp (www.winamp.com) to listen to it, quietly grateful for another technological marvel: radio-based broad bandwidth.

                Copyright (c) 2004 by Joe Bert G. Lazarte