A Nation of Pirates
Panicked by digital plunder, the entertainment industry fights back
The movie industry estimates that Internet swapping costs it more than $3.5 billion a year worldwide. Record companies are also claiming huge losses. While the sagging economy and the lack of an exciting pop-music trend bear some responsibility for the industry's 26 percent decline in CD sales since 1999--a $4.3 billion drop--digital piracy undoubtedly plays a role.
Shriveled royalties. Many pirates have little sympathy for the big companies, but the record labels are not the only ones hurt. Songwriters, who traditionally have relied on the sales of hit records to provide income for years after they topped the charts, have watched their job's version of a pension plan shrivel up. "My royalties have literally been cut in half by this thing," says Lamont Dozier, a member of the Motown songwriting team that penned dozens of Top 20 tunes including the Supremes' "Stop! In the Name of Love" and the Four Tops' "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)." "It's really taken a toll on my situation."
Piracy is also pinching independent record stores. As bootlegging has spread, these retailers--unable to lure customers by offering bargains on household gadgets or slashing CD prices as stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart do--have watched their customer base dwindle. "I've never seen a more horrible time," says Ron Liest, whose family has owned Stedeford's Records on Pittsburgh's North Side since 1964. "We were just joking that maybe we should sell Krispy Kremes," says Liest, whose store specializes in rhythm and blues, rap, and other urban styles of music. Independent retailers often champion up-and-coming artists, and their decline could mean a loss of diversity in music.
Yet the convenience and anonymity of file sharing have made it a remarkably guilt-free form of plunder. In effect, the masses of Americans have joined the previously small chorus of hard-core hackers in chanting the credo "Information wants to be free." "For all practical purposes it is stealing music, but I have no moral qualms about it," says Vik, a 21-year-old college senior from Baltimore who uses Kazaa. "When you can get free music, it's hard to resist."
This frenzy of trading draws its strength from the theory of "six degrees of separation"--the notion that only a relatively few steps are needed to link you to any other person in the world. With hundreds of millions of PCs plugged into the Internet at any given moment, chances are high that at least one of them has a digital copy of that rare Bruce Springsteen live recording or missed episode of Sex and the City. Your computer just needs an efficient way of asking other PCs where that particular file can be found. That's where a peer-to-peer software program--such as Kazaa or LimeWire--comes in. It forwards your search request to other computers on the network, each of which searches its hard drive for the file you want. If it's there, that computer establishes a direct connection to yours and begins transferring the tune or video. If not, the computer forwards your request to other PCs. By going out just a few degrees--most peer-to-peer services set the range at seven--your computer can network with about 10,000 other PCs and access a million files. Typically the search locates a copy of the desired file within minutes.
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