March 1, 1999

Expert to Help Devise Format for Delivering Music on Internet

By NEIL STRAUSS

he recording industry, anxious for a way to move safely and profitably into the era of Internet delivery of music, has taken a major step by putting an influential digital architect in charge of the effort.

At a seven-hour, closed-door meeting of 200 top executives in the music and technology industries, Leonardo Chiariglione was named on Friday to head the Secure Digital Music Initiative. The group is seeking to create a technical format for the copyrighted sale and digital delivery of music over the Internet.

	Leonardo Chiariglione, who helped create MP3, will help the music industry deal with the problems it has spawned.

Chiariglione, an Italian researcher, was instrumental in creating the industry-standard formats for converting and compressing video and audio information into digital form, known as MPEG.

The Secure Digital Music Initiative, announced in December, is an attempt by the recording industry associations of North America, Japan and Europe to create a standardized way to distribute songs and albums on the Internet. The technical challenge is to do so in a way that protects copyright holders and foils the many audio pirates who copy and distribute digital music illegally.

Significantly, one of the MPEG formats that Chiariglione helped create, MP3, has become the favorite way for Internet pirates to copy and transmit music. So the music industry, in essence, has recruited the man who opened the Pandora's box of Internet piracy to ask him to close it.

After his selection at Friday's meeting, Chiariglione startled many in the audience by announcing an ambitious timetable, one that may confound the many Internet skeptics who have derided the secure-music initiative as coming too late to turn back the free-music tide. He said he planned to have preliminary standards on paper by June to ensure that an industry-backed format would be approved in time to let recording companies start using it to sell music online by Christmas and to enable electronics companies to have compatible devices ready to play the newly formatted songs.

By comparison, it took an equivalent standards group five years to develop a format for recording and playing back audio on the new generation of DVD disks.

"When I was told that in six months they'd have a result, I didn't think it was possible," said Marina Bosi, who attended Friday's conference. She is president of the Audio Engineering Society and one of the creators of AAC -- a higher-fidelity sequel to MP3. "But knowing the background that Chiariglione is bringing to this process I think there's a chance this might happen," she said, although she added a note of caution: "It's a very tough schedule, and we're talking about meetings every two weeks. Just the travel alone is absurd."

Another conference attendee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the enormity of the task ahead became apparent to him the night before the meeting, after he drew up a list of 14 variables -- including problems posed by removable personal computer hard drives, the new challenges of cable modems and the onslaught of portable devices for playing the music. Each of the 14 issues could require its own subcommittee, this person said.

And even Chiariglione acknowledged that there was a considerable amount of work to be done in a relatively short time. "We have to integrate a range of technologies that was probably never attempted before by anyone," he said.

Chiariglione is an executive at the corporate research center of Telecom Italia, working there since 1971. Although known as an eccentric leader, he is a relentless taskmaster and a stickler for deadlines.

In 1988 he founded the industry's MPEG committee, which standardized not only MPEG-1 and MP3 but also the newer MPEG-4, which has a built-in copyright protection system. The committee is now at work on MPEG-7, which will have built-in capabilities for letting users search for specific audio or video information within a file.

"We were looking for one of the handful of people in the world who would be able to pull together an effort as ambitious as this one that would enable the kinds of future business models we all are interested in pursuing," said Cary Sherman, the general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America, who led the meeting.

Chiariglione's selection as head of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, whose members are paying $10,000 a year to participate, suddenly makes him an even more influential man: Companies with technologies that end up being incorporated into the standard format stand to make millions simply from patent royalties or licensing fees.

Internet anarchists, pirates and utopians have been predicting that the delivery of music on the Internet would put record labels out of business. Their vision seemed to be confirmed late last year when the industry began a series of lawsuits motivated out of fear -- blocking bands like the Beastie Boys from putting MP3 files of their music online, for example, and unsuccessfully suing Diamond Technologies, which put the first portable Walkman-like MP3 player on the market.

But attendees at the meeting, who saw presentations about Internet business models by the heads of technology at Universal Music and BMG Music, said that the record labels now seemed to have a focused notion of what must be done to help the industry migrate successfully from the CD era to the Internet age.

Others in the music business, however, were less enthralled by the meeting. These critics saw it as a step forward for the record industry but a move backward for a long-nurtured Internet dream. In that vision, artists have seen the Internet as a way for their music to reach fans directly; as a way for fans to get music at lower prices because there are no materials costs for transmitting music online, and as a way for musicians to get a bigger share of the profits from their work by avoiding the record-label middle man.

Nina Crowley, who runs the Massachusetts Music Industry Coalition, a national artist's rights organization, noted the absence of musicians and artists at Friday's meeting. "It's probably the only chance artists have had in 30 years to gain back some ground," she said. "But the RIAA is going to beat them to it if they don't take some control."

And won't some pirates feel betrayed that the person who helped open the Internet to music fans is now trying to restrain it for big business? Maybe. But Chiariglione said he never set out to abet piracy.

When the initial standards were set for MPEG, home recording devices for digital piracy did not exist. But now piracy is a primary concern.

"For the technology to be put to good use," Chiariglione said, "you have to create a boundary."

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Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

• Leonardo Chiariglione's home page

• Secure Digital Music Initiative

• Recording Industry Association of America

• Massachusetts Music Industry Coalition