By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 21, 2002; Page A01
The first time Travis Daub got "spoofed," he figured faulty software was to blame. Hoping to sample the new album by Moby, he downloaded one of its songs, "We Are All Made of Stars," from the Web site LimeWire.com. But what wound up on his hard drive wasn't what he expected.
"It was just 20 seconds of the song, repeated over and over," says Daub, a 26-year-old design director who lives in Arlington. "At first I thought it was a glitch. Then I realized someone had posted this on purpose."
The identity of that someone is a mystery -- Moby's label and management team say it wasn't them. But in recent weeks, scads of "spoof" files have been anonymously posted to the hugely popular sites where music fans illegally trade songs online. Spoofs are typically nothing more than repetitive loops or snippets filled with crackle and hiss, and thousands are now unwittingly downloaded every day from file-sharing services, like Kazaa and Morpheus, that sprang up after Napster's demise.
Record labels are reluctant to discuss spoofing, but their trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, has called it a legitimate way to combat piracy. And at least one company acknowledges that it has been hired to distribute spoofs, although it won't say by whom.
All of this suggests that the dummy files are part of a second front in the record industry's war against illegal music copying. For years, the fight focused on Web sites and their owners. Now it's starting to focus on the fans themselves.
For the labels, any anti-piracy campaign that targets consumers is risky, since it could alienate many who also spend heavily on store-bought discs. But given a two-year slide in CD sales that the industry says has cost it billions, many executives and artists believe they don't have a choice. New file-sharing ventures sprout all the time, and 2 billion songs a month are now traded online, according to the RIAA, far more than during Napster's heyday. Meantime, sales of blank CDs, which can be used to copy songs on the cheap, are skyrocketing.
So labels are racing to develop uncopyable CDs and -- if indeed they're behind the spoofs -- employing guerrilla tactics that complicate the unlawful uploading and downloading of songs. The labels are also supporting a bill, now under consideration in Congress, that would make it legal to "impair the operation of peer-to-peer" networks, such as LimeWire. That could be done, for example, by overloading file-sharing services with so many requests that they slow to a crawl.
"I think in the history of the music business, we've been, with regard to enforcing our rights, pretty generous with consumers," said Hilary Rosen, chairwoman of the RIAA. "But we're looking for a way to stop gross infringers, and there are measures we can take to prevent people from making 100 copies or uploading CDs for millions to take."
The strategy has generated plenty of skepticism, however, and not just among those who regard music thievery as a sacred mission. Some executives in the online music world say the majors -- Sony, Universal, Warner Bros., BMG and EMI -- are wasting their time. Foolproof locks, they say, don't exist in the digital realm, where it takes just one dedicated hacker to open the vault for everyone else.
"All this smacks of desperation," says Eric Garland, president of BigChampagne, a company hired by major labels to measure online file-sharing traffic. "When you've got a consumer movement of this magnitude, when tens of millions of people say, 'I think CD copying is cool and I'm within my rights to do it,' it gets to the point where you have to say uncle and build a business model around it rather than fight it."
Sounding a Sour Note
The record labels have been spurred to action by figures they find terrifying: The number of "units shipped" -- CDs sent to record stores or directly to consumers -- fell by more than 6 percent last year, and it's widely expected to fall 6 to 10 percent more by the end of 2002. Those drops are already hitting the industry hard. Labels are laying off employees, ditching artists, slashing budgets for tours and videos, and combing their back catalogues for reissues that cost almost nothing to release.
Pinpointing the cause of the sales decline is difficult. Entertainment options have multiplied in the past 20 years -- the video game industry, for instance, now dwarfs the music business -- giving kids a lot of new places to spend money.
There's evidence, though, that Americans are spending more time than ever listening to CDs. Market surveys suggest that more blank CDs (CD-Rs) than recorded CDs are now sold in the United States. Recorded discs still generate far more revenue, of course, since they sell for about $17 apiece, a sum that will buy about 50 CD-Rs. And CD-Rs have plenty of uses other than bootlegging music -- they store photos and data, too. But analysts and retailers say the CD-R is fast replacing the cassette as the music-copying medium of choice, with sound quality that far outclasses analog tapes.
Labels claim that sales of CD-Rs spike during the same week a major new release hits stores -- a sign that people are buying, say, the new Bruce Springsteen CD and making free copies of it for their friends.
Thus far, only halting, low-key steps have been taken to thwart mass copying. Just four titles, including an album by country singer Charley Pride, have been released in the United States with reconfigured coding intended to render them unplayable in computer hard drives, which is where most CD burning and uploading to Web sites takes place. Even these tentative moves proved controversial, however, because buyers who merely wanted to play the CDs on their computers couldn't do so. And one congressman said the labels warning consumers that the discs didn't play on PCs were so small that he threatened legislation.
"The labels run the risk of angering millions of their best customers with these copy-protected CDs," Rep. Rich Boucher, a Virginia Democrat and Internet policy maven, said in a recent phone interview. "That's a business call on their part. But I think there's a role for Congress to make sure that copy-protected CDs are adequately labeled."
For the labels, this first stab at safeguarding had an even greater liability: It didn't work very well. Hackers gleefully reported that they could defeat the security encryption with a felt-tip pen, and artists declined to release copy-protected albums, figuring that the discs would annoy fans without plumping their royalty checks. "It just doesn't work," said David Bowie, whose latest album, "Heathen," was released protection-free. "I mean, what's the point?"
The majors seem to appreciate that these initial experiments were flawed. Though mum about upcoming releases with protection, they say they're back in the lab, hoping to devise software that allows legal copying (for personal use, such as a copy for the car), while blocking illegal activity (like sharing a song with millions of other fans on Napster-like services).
The ultimate goal is to retire the so-called "Red Book" CD standard that was developed in 1980 by Sony and Phillips, and which is embedded in nearly every recorded compact disc sold today. The Red Book CD was one of the most successful entertainment products in history, but unlike the DVD, it was designed without virtual security bolts. Labels won't abandon the good old five-inch plastic disc -- it's a medium that consumers clearly love -- but in the coming two or three years, they'll phase in new and more secure audio standards.
"What we'll see is new media coming out that will have a lot of flexibility built into the format," said Larry Kenswil of Universal Music Group.
It's unclear, though, if labels can win a spy-vs.-spy game of technology upgrades against hardware manufacturers and hackers. On the market already are devices like the Ripflash. Plug the $179 gadget into your stereo and it will convert anything that plays over your speakers -- an LP, a cassette, a CD -- into an MP3 file, the software format of choice for online song swappers.
"If you play it, we can record it in MP3," says Bob Fullerton of Pogo Products, which makes Ripflash. "And there's no legal way to restrict that, that I know of."
Digital Do-It-Yourselfers
In the past, whenever consumers swooned for a new music format, like CDs, the record industry made a fortune from the conversion. This time, millions of listeners are again getting their music in a new medium -- MP3s and other modem-friendly formats -- but the labels aren't profiting from the revolution. This time the revolution is actually hurting them.
"Kids are consuming music, it's just that they're doing it in ways that aren't making money for the industry," says David Pakman, a senior vice president with Bertelsmann's BeMusic, the company's Internet music division. "Kids are saying, 'We want music, but we want it on different terms.' "
