- The New Piracy: From Search To 'Search And Destroy'
http://prod1.cmj.com/articles/display_article.php?id=42547513
: The New Piracy: From Search To 'Search And Destroy'
By Kory Grow
On April 19, Pissed Jeans leaked. A 27-year-old from Minneapolis going by the handle Werewolvez logged onto the message board for Modern Radio, a Twin Cities-based indie label, and wrote, "Enjoy this link stolen from another board for the new Pissed Jeans Hope For Men record out on Sub Pop in awhile (sic). Should work for a few days." "Awhile" was actually June 5—nearly two months before the release of the Allentown, Pennsylvania post-grunge quartet's anticipated sophomore album. Yet anyone searching for the band or album name on Google could stumble onto this board, find the link and download the whole record.
This is the new piracy. While pre-legal Napster clones and torrent sites remain the ire of many record labels' legal departments, search engines have quietly become the more dangerous enabler. Search engines lead to blogs and boards that link to other sites hosting compressed files of entire albums, requiring no passwords or secret handshakes for access. Just as their original music sources are harder to trace, these sites provide anonymity to pirates as board posters and bloggers trade links, creating a blur of IP addresses as they trade hands. Also, the added accessibility search engines provide creates a lower common denominator between those who are obsessive music fans and those who just want to download albums.
In the case of the Pissed Jeans leak, the links led to Sendspace, a large file-sharing site, hosting a 76- megabyte zip file containing MP3s of the entire album. Less than an hour after the initial post, a user by the name of "subpop" logged on and posted a response: "Hello. We recently looked at your blog and found you've been distributing our record to your readers for free. How nice of you! Pissed Jeans - Hope For Men. Accessed: 632 times. Since we have access to the numbers for Pissed Jeans, I assume you'll be sending us the wholesale amount for the copies you distributed? 632 copies at $9.16, wholesale = $5,789.12." The letter was signed "Bruce Pavitt, Sub Pop Records," and it quickly inspired a bevy of outcries. "This isn't a blog!" said one confused message board user, while another said, "OMG, Sub Pop is going to sue TOM!" referring to the board's moderator. Werewolvez posted, "You'll never catch me alive, motherfuckers!" and within a couple of hours posted links to other albums.
Ironically, that reply didn't actually come from Sub Pop. (Pavitt, who founded the Seattle label in 1986, retired about five years ago, according to the label's publicist.) It seems this joke was lampooning itself and how difficult these links are to track. In actuality, this form of piracy—specifically using large-filesharing sites such as RapidShare, Megaupload, Mediafire, Yousendit and countless others that host full albums (sometimes even artist discographies) that are easily Googleable—is cumbersome to wrangle, due to the alacrity with which links spread across message boards and blogs. That makes them equally as difficult for labels to squelch. Stuart Meyer, who does production and A&R for Sub Pop, explains: "You can get something taken down [from a file-sharing site] and you can frustrate somebody's looking for something, sure, but as soon as it's [actually released]... it's everywhere."
Meyer says he's looked into taking legal action against the search engines themselves that lead downloaders to these sites, but he hasn't had much luck. "It just kind of seems to be a thing that no one is monitoring yet...," Meyer says. "The torrent sites... were hot as hell and it seems like the RapidShare stuff has replaced that, to some extent."
The Internet has shown an ability to boost underground musical artists to the same level of availability as mainstream artists. So it's been artists from the niche genres—mostly found on labels who cannot afford or choose not to employ preventative copy protecting technology—that have been "shared" the most, be it indie rock, extreme metal or underground hip-hop. Reynold Jaffe, who handles indie metal label Relapse's business and legal affairs, says his label has been aware of search-engine piracy since it evolved from standard peer-to-peer sharing networks. To combat the piracy, Relapse leaks MP3 files named to look like their releases, but in actuality are recordings of "traditional Bulgarian Tuba skronks" or "John Fahey-esque acoustic guitar ramblings," according to Jaffe.
"What we're seeing for the first time in the history of the music industry," Jaffe says, "is the consumers and music fans calling the shots. For decades, everything was controlled by the labels... Unlike the switch from LPs and tapes to CDs, the move from CDs to MP3s was not label-driven. This is a phenomenon created by consumers, which the music industry has been forced to react to."
Bloggers and message board users like Werewolvez probably do not set out to destroy independent artists' careers, but are instead bygone products of major-label mistakes such as letting Big Box physical retailers sell CDs under cost (thus lowering consumers' perceived value of what they'll pay for music) and the copyprotection scandal (where Sony BMG added a hackable root kit on every CD) making labels the "enemy." To wit, most music blogs that link to file sharing sites carry disclaimers like the one on Bolachas Grátis, a Portuguese site: "The postings are for promotional and preview purposes only and all music downloaded from here should be deleted within 24 hours. If you like the albums you downloaded here, please support the artist by buying their CDs (sic)." Whether or not these leaked links are truly altruistic or just indifferent to sales concerns is up for debate. In any event, search enginebased sharing is a complicated conundrum that will take the force and resources of the corporations behind the majors to settle the problem, technologically and socially. Though, as Jaffe points out, "The major labels have lost the support of the public... So your average music fan doesn't give a hoot about the major labels' woes. In fact, most probably root against them."
Bruno Coelho, 23, is one of Bolachas Grátis' six contributors. Reached via MySpace, he was happy to answer some questions about his blog. Rather than some faceless pirate, he seems more like a friendly music obsessive. Bolachas Grátis' links come from other sharing blogs and he does not use peer-to-peer (P2P) programs. He and his friends do not know where the leaks originate. He and the other contributors also post on an online music-discussion community called Fórum Sons, and they started this blog to separate that site from this Bolachas Grátis' illegal activities. While he acknowledges trading files is forbidden in his country, he also adds, "The laws in Portugal about music are very antiquated," which is a sentiment most of these types of bloggers share worldwide.
Much like the home-taping scare in the '80s, most of these sites have originated in countries where their citizens cannot easily access American independent music. The fact that search engines make these sites accessible to anyone has been an unexpected byproduct. Raquel, 27, whose last name was unavailable, is another poster on Bolachas Grátis. She says, "At first only Fórum Sons users knew about it, but soon the word was spread and we are getting visitors from everywhere in the world." Most importantly, were Bolachas Grátis to ever get shut down, Coelho says he and his friends would either start another blog, find another way to share the albums or just not offer them publicly. "We're aware it might [get shut down] in the future," Raquel says. "We just think it's worth doing this sort of public service for anyone who can't, for any reason, keep buying all the records they want to listen to."
Of the two or three labels that have contacted him about removing links on the blog, Coelho says, "If I had a record label, I'd look at share blogs as a friend that would help the promotion of the bands/albums and not like an enemy. The artists don't make money only by selling albums. In reality, the bigger part of this money goes to labels and other people. The bands make money at concerts and they only have people at the concerts if people know them. Blogs like Bolachas Grátis give the [exposure] that they need. But most of the record labels don't think like that, and if they want, I remove the links." (Incidentally, bands are getting less money from labels as a result of downloading's perceived loss of profits, making it harder for smaller bands to tour.)
So while Coelho's Robin Hood logic about music economics is skewed, it is nonetheless the opinion most 20-something bloggers share. As a result, in their measures to combat any and all piracy, some labels have started to take on file-sharing blogs. One repeat defender on the labels' behalf is John Giacobbi, the managing director of the UK-based company Web Sheriff, a subsidiary of Entertainment Law Associates. With the motto "Protecting your rights on the Internet," the company has worked with artists as diverse as Jamiroquai, the Village People and, recently, Bloc Party, policing P2P sites and blogs. Calling from his office, Giacobbi explains, "We actually rationalize and reason with the bloggers, and, generally speaking, that's proven to be very successful, as people can appreciate where we're coming from, as opposed to threatening people, which I think is... an inappropriate thing to sue fans just for their own exuberance and over-enthusiasm." In treating bloggers with respect, Giacobbi says he's gotten the most compliance. While he's never specifically taken on Google or other search engines, he does have working relationships with the myriad largefile- sharing sites, who all remove the illegal content when asked. Still, it's much different from other piracy cases he's tackled. "It's like an indefinite process," says Giacobbi. "So what we do is we'll police a major album for two to three months until the release to preserve sales for like a specified period after the release."
At this point in time, however, other than contacting each blog or going straight to the file sharing sites as Giacobbi does, there is no easy solution. Watermark technology has made some leaks traceable (usually to journalists or recording studio employees) but even then, when an album is out there, it's out there. For Sub Pop's Meyer as with Bolacha Grátis' blog disclaimer, it just comes down to trust. "It's funny, I read these blogs sometimes and the kids will be like 'I'm going to buy this when it comes out,' and I'd like to say that I believe that they do," Meyer says. "I mean a lot of people were saying that about the Shins, and it sold real well."
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