You heard it first! The solution to the Napster problem
Jul 15 '00
Does anyone know what the equivalent organization to RIAA is for literature? I didn't think so. There's a reason for that. Ultimately, books don't have the same problem that music has. People are not going to read books online, yet. And even if they do, there will always be people who want to purchase books. Because with books, the media matters. That's why a hardcover books comes out first, then the softcover, then (probably), the electronic version.
The thing about Napster is that this technology has been around for a long time. You could always copy music from one media to another. Sometimes, the quality would degrade, and sometimes, you couldn't find someone with that song you wanted to copy. With MP3, the quality stays the same (though not even as good as CD quality), and you can find any song you ever wanted.
So even if RIAA wins the suit, and closes down Napster, there are a million little clone sites out there willing to do the dirty work and risk getting caught. Even encryption won't help, as it can be cracked just like anything else. Encryption also implies that CD's will be encrypted, meaning that everyone will have to get new CD players that play encrypted songs. No way! In addition, that won't work, as we have seen with DVD's. Someone has already cracked that encyption algorithm, and now the movie industry just has to accept it, because there is no way they could convince all those people who bought DVD players to "upgrade" them.
So digitial media is copyable, and doesn't degrade with copying. And people prefer digital media over other types of media because it is convenient. There are all types of media, and they can all be converted to digital, as long as someone buys the proper recording device.
With music, it doesn't matter which media you use, right? Wrong! Listen to some old school artists like Neil Young and Chuck D. They have been complaining for the past 10 years about the quality of digital media. That's because digital media is inherently inferior to analog. The reason for this is simple, and it has to do with the way digital music is recorded, versus the way that analog music is recorded.
Analog music is continuous. Analog media (such as a record player), records the entire song. Imagine the sound wave as continuous flowing line that goes up and down like a wave, and then imagine this wave smoothly flowing onto a wax disc, where the wave gets converted into bumps and grooves on that disc. Simply put, that's how you make a record.
Digital music is discontinuous. Anything digital needs to be broken up into bits and pieces (Does that come from digits? hmmm...) Anyway, imagine the music, again as a continuous flowing wave, that then gets send through a machine that takes a little piece out of that wave, 10 times a second. That's what is referred to as "sampling". The human ear normally hears things sampled at around 10x a second as normal, but most people can hear the difference between different sampling rates, even if they don't understand why it sounds different.
If the sampling rate gets too low, the music sounds choppy. As the sampling rate increases, the quality gets better. But the sampling rate would have to reach infinity to have the same quality as records.
Now I know what you are thinking. "Records suck! I can't play them in my car or my walkman, they skip all the time and the quality is scratchy and poor." But since records were introduced about 90 years ago, the technology has come a long way. I think that there's no reason to believe that records can't overcome the boundaries that have been placed on them.
For instance, they don't have to use wax. The grooves in a record could be moved to a substance that accomodates "finer" grooves, and perhaps is magnetic, so that it holds the "needle" to the record better. There are lots of other advances that could be made, too.
The point is, the record industry needs a way to make sure that it is hard to copy music. Digitally, it is easy, and it always will be. But using analog technology, it is quite difficult (and always will be!) to make copies of analog recordings that keep the same quality. Even records pressed from the original are not the same quality as the original. So ultimately, the record industry will need to return to their vinyl roots to survive.
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