Once upon a time, there was this magical era where people just sometimes had instruments, and would play them for their friends and family because there were very few centralized means to hear music through. Despite the fact that Plato and Aristotle had already gotten into plenty of theory about (what's now) modern modal music, including what we now call the major and minor scales, these ideas were very slow to gain widespread acceptance. It was only during the last years of the Middle Ages that the use of polyphonic melodies again became popular - only a small amount of music remained from the Classical ages, most of it Greek music. On the other hand, there was music passed down by oral tradition - a commodity, in today's terms, out of the hands of any businessmen. It was only when music began to attain widespread popularity that people began to see it as anything like a source of profit. Concert halls would pack for the most popular of musicians, not to mention the money from drinks, and sheet music was an even more valuable commodity, to what point that the current notation was capable of describing music. Still, most of the world was still, by all considerable means, out of the reach of European powers, and outside of musicians who were somehow patronized by the state or other substantive economic bodies, oral music was the only source of entertainment for most of the world. Then something changed.

The Industrial Revolution was the start of it. The printing press introduced the possibility of mass reproduction of sheet music, information about composers, information about theory - all of it. There's the interesting thing about ideas - once technology itself has attained somewhat of a critical mass, its own continuous acceleration is guaranteed. The printing press hinted at the sort of distribution that the telegram, and then the telephone, radio and television would allow for. By 1900, we had already developed wax cylinders onto which music could be recorded and replayed with considerable fidelity.

As always, there was an idea that could be capitalized upon. There was a definite market for the distribution of music - to have a representation of a popular musician in your own living room must have seemed like the most ludicrous idea to the first that heard it. Like all 'modern' technologies, it began as something only affordable to the rich. A luxury, if you will. So it quickly becomes something that the more impoverished portion of the market is craving - its value lies not in what it represents, per se, but its perceived unavailability. Like any commodity, however: once significant demand is received, an industry balloons.

What is essential for this behavior for to be possible is a centralized scheme for the distribution of music. The telephone lines created one-to-one links between households, but there remained a central command center, an early server, you could say, to handle the connections. A select number of businessmen have the only access to the means of mass reproduction, as some record companies, through whatever deterrence of competition you want to describe, rose to the top and gained vast control over the industry. So now, we have a group of companies with the means for the distribution of music, who essentially have the collective ability to decide what music is popular, what music is under demand, and what music is sold. A very unfortunate thing happens: we have musicians like Britney Spears, all over the headlines. I cannot recall the point in my life at which I first learned of Britney Spears - since what must have been middle school, she has polluted the news, the tabloids, the public consciousness. It's not that she's a huge detriment or anything (that's up for debate), just frightening to think about.

Something even more fascinating has happened, however, that threatens to end this scheme. A scientist named Vannevar Bush, a man implicit in the development of the Manhattan Project, and the entire military/industrial complex generated during World War II in the United States, described an idea he dubbed the Memex - essentially the first decentralized network for communication. Paul Baran also described an idea named "packet switching," in which isolated blocks of data are transmitted electronically from one point to another - an idea which allowed for the development of early networks such as ARPAnet, while a renegade scientist named John C. Lilly theorized as to the immersion of consciousness itself in a global network, believing, after extensive use of entheogens and extreme sensory deprivation, that there was a mode of communication, which he dubbed "Earth Coincidence Control Office," that allowed this to occur, also allowing him to interact with dolphins. This seems like an extraordinary idea, but (bear with me) it may not be for long.

Xanadu was arguably the first solid theoretical precursor to the internet, developed by a student of both Bush and Lilly's, a man named Ted Nelson. What emerged from his ideas was a concept named 'hypertext', which allowed for the linked description of other pages. ARPAnet was next, a national network developed by the United States military for rapid electronic communication - the first spam, in fact, was sent out over it (demanding a stern lecture from a military general and a warning that the network should never again be used to send messages to multiple destinations). Eventually the National Center for Supercomputing Applications developed something called Mosaic, the golden stake in the railroad that allowed the internet to ignite, later turning into Netscape Navigator, which was quickly thrust into fierce competition with Microsoft's flagship Internet Explorer. In its first beginnings, these new technologies slowly created a fierce opposition from the so-called 'content' industry - first Usenet allowed the almost completely decentralized discussion and distribution of music, then the Motion Pictures Standards Group developed a technology that would revolutionize the storage of distribution of music - a lossy audio format that allowed songs to be stored, with well-comparable fidelity, at roughly 1/10 the size they would be on a compact disc. A student at Northwestern University, Shawn Fanning, developed the Napster technology, a simple service that allowed for the distribution of a number of songs.

This is when it got really bad.

The recording industry itself was outraged, and individual artists were quick to jump to their support, in spite of the fact that at this point, artists were lucky to receive a tenth of CD sales. Famously, Metallica's Lars Ulrich publicly sued Napster to seek lost profits, banning hundreds of users who had innocently downloaded even a single Metallica song. People were pissed. Maybe some of you remember the Napster Bad! video, which seemed to capture a lot of the sentiment regarding the lawsuit - a handful of greedy musicians exploiting laws developed in order to directly support the 'content industry' over the last hundred years to actually sue their fans. Nothing like this had ever occurred before. It was only a spectre, though, of the future that awaited the online file-sharing communities scattered around every city of the world. Companies like MediaSentry, little more than agents of media conglomerates like the MPAA and RIAA, have arisen to collect off of threatening and ruining downloads for unsuspecting internet users. We musn't forget that each individual 'sharing' of a song is little more than the creation of a copy of the song for a friend - in no way is the original copy invalidated, but most importantly, in no way does the individual profit off of this. Despite the fact that laws existed already to protect home reproduction of music, their terminology and their description of the current technology became outdated quickly. These laws were designed by aging politicians, many of them with no experience whatsoever with these newer technologies - Presidential candidate John McCain himself tries to send "internets" to his staff.

What the laws, and the content industry, essentially fail to recognize (or do, in fact, recognize, while acknowledging that there's still some money to bleed out of 'content'), is that technology is out-pacing them. They attempt to compromise, by investing in companies that offer to try to make money off of the internet's models for file sharing by selling the same content that's already freely available for download, sometimes even before the album's release. We already have means for instant communication and the transmission of vast amounts of data, but what's to prevent the further advancement of technology? Text, audio, and even video can be broadcast streaming across the internet, so there remains little possibility for it to stop here - our minds, the motions our brains attempt, all of it can be described over the internet - we may soon find we have video games that immerse our consciousness directly into the internet, echoing Lilly's ideas. Through the development of this as some sort of art of its own, technology may provide us with an entire world of our creation to explore. These conglomerates, however, historically have done nothing but try to prevent the new advancement of technologies that they perceived as a threat to their profits - videotapes were a famous example, as some of you may remember the bitter fight that occurred over them.

The legal arguments for the RIAA, the MPAA and other media conglomerates are already stretched thin - see what you can find about the "making available" argument to see what I mean. The attempts to win over public sentiment to support their cause flies in the face of the obvious fact that music is now available for free - so they produce campaigns glorifying the quest of the content providers: "Think You're Safe Downloading Music? THINK AGAIN. Lawsuits Start Next Friday." In effect, this is a loud statement of "not only is 'piracy' immoral in our narrow conception of morality, it sounds just bad enough that we could buy off the government to harass you for doing it!" The lawyers they can afford are matched by the lawyers who have a strong objection to their countless hindrances to the acceleration of technology, to their mindless bullying of their own customers for "damages paid" in amounts in incredibly excess of what that person may have even theoretically cost them - the ACLU, the EFF, and other groups with considerable worldwide support - and so what we witness is these conglomerates, like beached giant squids, lashing out at passersby in anger that they can no longer return to water. They demand in a shriek that we compensate them for something that they've taken from us and turned into a commodity for resale, and so we find sites like The Pirate Bay and offshore download services like Megaupload and Rapidshare polluted to the brim with everything most people would want to download, free from nearly any conceivable threat of prosecution - but of course, we somehow managed to pressure the Swedish embassy to shut down The Pirate Bay - for a few days. The notion in their minds that they can continue to profit off of music in this environment, that itself is insane, especially considering that the availability of information on musical technique and home recording are now widespread as the material being produced. Websites like last.fm actually provide a relational database describing almost all music that has any significant popularity (a small requirement) with Internet users, so essentially anybody with access to the internet and some basic recording equipment may be broadcast almost entirely on his or her merits (or MySpace, Purevolume, even Sordo). The democratization of music is nearly complete, and video and more advanced media will be soon to follow. What we will see soon is the reduction of these media conglomerates to little more than marketing agencies, as they are already completely losing control of all means for distribution of music. Eventually, marketing itself will become unprofitable, now that the price for exposure of an advertisement is excitedly raised with every hit on a website, while ads become essentially ineffective in the face of powerful web software, and they will simply disappear. Artists who have relied on patronage in any of its forms for a career, regardless of how they may feel about the price charged for their music, will simply have little option but to give it away for free. Traditional venues like shows will, of course, still happen, and the most popular of musicians will probably be able to raise enough money to live off of this alone - if they can still manage to sell hard media of their songs, it won't be for more than 20 or 30 years, as old formats become increasingly irrelevant.

To echo a quote given from a professor of a character in a movie produced by the same moguls who would try to stop us from downloading the movie itself, "human knowledge belongs to the world." I say this without a shred of doubt in my mind: there is no possibility, none, that the vast majority of people reading this article will have to pay for any type of media for their entire life. What we are witnessing is the greatest expansion of communication that the world has ever seen - as the technologies that are now at all widespread are themselves described over these networks, we will witness a distinct change in nearly every way the world functions. Meanwhile, it is simply ridiculous to think that you can capture a sound from the air and charge for it.

ushdfgakjasgh's writeup directly or indirectly makes the following three points about reproducing and distributing copyrighted works free of charge:

• There's no moral or legal question, because charging for what should be free is in itself immoral, and the laws side with the end user, not the copyright holder
• It's inevitable, because the curve of technology has outpaced the ability of copyright holders to control the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of media
• The free and open exchange of all media will be a good thing for everyone involved

Where to begin?

Morality and Legality

The problem with arguing the morality of anything is that morality is subjective. That's also why it's hard to codify morality. Most people believe that murder is wrong and murderers should be punished, but even something as basic as murder has all manner of caveats appended to it. There are degrees of murder, separate categories for accidental murders (i.e. manslaughter), punishments for being an accessory to murder, questions about what constitutes murder (Is abortion murder? Is euthanasia murder?), and instances in which murder is condoned (self-defense) or is in fact carried out by law (death penalty). Something that appears to be clear cut on the surface isn't so clear cut.

A similar issue arises when one tries to define theft. Many people don't consider making a copy of a CD (or DVD, or MP3) to be theft, because no one is deprived of their property. This appears to be one of the two arguments that ushdfgakjasgh makes for why it's OK to do this:

• Nothing happens to the original during the copy
• The owner of the original does not profit from the copy

Other common arguments include the fact that artists receive only a fraction of the money made from music sales, or that the person who ends up with the copy would never have paid money for it anyway. All of these arguments are moral justifications for reproducing and distributing copyrighted works, and any argument one way or the other about the morality of it is futile. It's much better to focus on the legality of D&R.

The writeup above would have you believe that the legal arguments against file sharing are "stretched thin", which seems to indicate that either copyright holders are suing end users frivolously, or the laws that protect copyright are being struck down. Neither of these is the case. Here are the two unarguable facts about copyright law in the United States:

• An owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to reproduction of the material.
• An owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to distribution of the material.

There is, of course, the principal of fair use, which is almost never successful in court, and never applies to the sort of D&R cases discussed in this write-up. The fact is, in nearly every major case involving copyright and the Internet, the copyright holders have won and won decisively, and in cases where the defendant won, copyright law was quickly changed to strengthen the rights of the copyright owner.

The first major example of this was United States v. David LaMacchia. In this case the defendant was distributing software over the Internet, but the case was dismissed because LaMacchia was not profiting from the distribution. This is one of the arguments that ushdfgakjasgh makes - that it's OK to reproduce copyrighted works if you don't profit from it. The problem is that the law disagrees, because shortly after the case was dismissed, Congress passed the No Electronic Theft Act. Distributing copies of copyrighted works is now a criminal act, regardless of whether or not you profit from it.

A&M Records v. Napster was probably the case that got the most attention, because Napster was the first P2P service to gain widespread popularity. Napster, probably foolishly, argued that downloading content was protected under fair use. Additionally, they asked the court to require copyright holders to grant a license to Napster. The court rejected both of these claims, and Napster was effectively shut down.

Not long after, MGM v. Grokster was decided in favor of MGM. Since Napster was taken to task for having the technology and wherewithal to prevent copyright infringement but refusing to do so, Grokster's argument was that as a decentralized P2P service, they had no control over what was shared on their network. The Supreme Court acknowledged this fact, but still ruled in favor of MGM, stating that because the Grokster business model involved actively promoting copyright infringement, the company could be held liable for the same.

These are just major cases. In countless other smaller and less-publicized cases, copyright holders have continued to pile up victory after victory over people who have "innocently downloaded even a single .... song." I am not saying this is a good thing. I'm not saying that this is right. I'm just pointing out the facts of the law. The facts of the law are this:

If you download copyrighted media without the authorization of the copyright holder, you are in violation of federal law. Not only are you in violation of federal law, but if you go to the EFF and ask them to take your case, they will politely sit down with you and explain to you why you are in the wrong. And if you go to the ACLU and ask them to take your case they will probably laugh in your face, because the charter of the ACLU is to defend the Constitution, not fight existing copyright laws.

ushdfgakjasgh makes a comment about "'making available' arguments" and suggests that the reader look at them to see the dire legal trouble that copyright holders are in. Presumably he's referring to Elektra v. Barker and others, in which the plaintiffs have argued that those who simply make files available for distribution are violating copyright, whether or not they know they're doing so, or whether or not those files are copied by others. The "making available" argument has been rejected by the courts, giving a brief rest to plaintiffs in file sharing suits, but this is mostly because existing copyright law does not adequately define what distribution is and isn't in the wake of technological advances. Put another way, it's semantics.

That's really all anyone can fight over at this point - definitions of reproduction and distribution as it pertains to a new all-digital, non-tangible model. In all likelihood, the definitions will be restated and redefined and reshaped by continued litigation and jurisprudence. Rest assured that the laws that govern this aren't being written by aging politicians who "sent 'Internets' to their staff" or senators who liken the Internet to a series of tubes. They're written by people who know exactly what their doing.

The Curve Of Technology

It's fair to assume that the curve of technology will eventually allow an end user to download a full-length high-definition film in just a few seconds. It's not really a question of if this will happen, but when. It's also quite likely that tangible media will become less and less common. Naturally this means that distribution costs will dwindle, as the price for pressing a compact disc and printing artwork and delivering it onto a truck and paying employees to sweep storefronts and print receipts and find things for you in the back will diminish.

The problem with the download-and-distribute model, from the point of view of record companies, is that they have no control over secondary D&R. This has been true for a long time, as ushdfgakjasgh notes with regard to video tapes, but it has been a gradual degradation of control. In the case of cassette tapes, fidelity was lost with subsequent copies, so copies had to be made from the original. This required time, effort, and money. You had to find somebody who had the original. Then you had to arrange for them to make a copy of that blank tape, which, if you were lucky, they could do at 2x or 3x if they had high-speed dubbing. Was it a major pain in the ass? No. But when Joe Nobody bought Van Halen's 1984, he wasn't going to make more than two or three copies of it, unless he was in desperate need of friends. Time, effort, and money - three inhibiting factors.

The advent of the Internet, and specifically, audio compression technology (e.g. MP3) took away all three inhibiting factors. When Joe Nobody buys a copy of the latest Coldplay album, he doesn't have to spend a half hour making a single copy for a friend. He can spend five minutes encoding it and then share it on the Internet where over a billion people have access to it. The recording industry has always known that it's impossible to completely eradicate piracy. The best they can hope for is to make it difficult for the average person. Small-scale piracy was largely ignored, large scale piracy required a significant monetary investment and willful intent. Now the industry is dealing with people who share music like they share Skittles, people who in many cases don't know what they're doing is illegal, and in other cases don't care. One schmuck in Battle Creek, Michigan can be responsible for 10,000 downloads and be barely aware of it.

The frequency with which something takes place is typically proportional to how easy it is to accomplish, and the frequency with which laws are broken is typically proportional to how easy it is to avoid prosecution. It's easy to download copyrighted material from the Internet, and the chances of being prosecuted for it are particularly low. Add those two factors together, and you have the two main reasons why people do it. That doesn't mean it's legal.

Free Media For All = The Communization Of Media

One should be very wary of a world where no one can charge any money for media. On the surface it sounds really cool. "I can watch Deadwood and The Wire and Buffy and the new Batman movie and listen to Pink Floyd and Radiohead and then read the latest Neal Stephenson novel... all free of charge." There's a serious flaw in that argument, and it's one that will be addressed, but first I want to visit a point made by ushdfgakjasgh, and that is what he calls "the democratization of music", which will occur when the industry loses its stranglehold on D&R, and the rise of D.I.Y. musicians allows everyone an equal chance at success.

The democratization of music has already happened, and it happened because of the existing D&R system. Every person who purchases an album votes democratically with his wallet, and every person who chooses not to purchase an album does the same. Britney Spears is mentioned, primarily because it's 2009 and she's a convenient target (in 1993 the target no doubt would have been Vanilla Ice or Milli Vanilli). Since a select group of people control distribution, the argument above reads, they have a "collective ability to decide what music is popular, what music is under demand, and what music is sold." This is just plain wrong.

Here's a painful truth about Britney Spears. Jive Records didn't make Britney Spears popular. Jive Records pushed her - they made a nice music video and peddled her everywhere they could, but it was consumers who decided her music was good enough to make ...Baby One More Time a number one album in twenty eight different countries. There's a saying that 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong, and the same is true with 14,000,000 Britney Spears fans. You can like or not like ...Baby One More Time, but you can't argue that it's crap. It's slickly produced, well-engineered, and catchy as fuck. It was one of the best pop music albums of 1999. People typically like pop music... that's why it's called popular music. People liked Britney Spears. People made Britney Spears popular. Music is subjective.

One can argue that even in musical democracy, none of the candidates are worth a vote. There's certainly some guy playing guitar in a bar in Alaska who is phenomenal. There's a rapper in Port-Au-Prince with a flow that would put Public Enemy to shame. There's a troupe of drummers in Kyrgyzstan that have more rhythm than you can fathom. And all of these artists are going to be bypassed by the industry as it exists, because the industry can't find and promote everyone who deserves it. It's the same reason why there's a construction worker in Duluth who would make an excellent President. But it's not for lack of trying. And record companies don't decide what music is popular. Believe it, if the music industry could get 14,000,000 people to buy a Modest Mouse album, they would. It's all the same to them. As long as they get paid.

One can lament the popularity of Britney Spears or whichever other artist they don't particularly like. But the reason why there is such a rich and varied musical landscape to choose from is simple: people can make money from it.

As mentioned above, the Internet has given people unprecedented access to information, from sites about music theory to Craiglist's posts from a girl in Cranston who is trying to get rid of her guitar. It's probably easier than ever to get started with music. The guy who drives to Cranston and gets the free guitar and reads a little bit about music theory and finds a clip on YouTube about how to play chords is off to a good start. But success is not about will. If people could succeed on sheer force of will, the people you see on American Idol who can't carry a tune would eventually be superstars. The fact is that in addition to will, you must have some degree of talent, and you must invest a significant amount of time to ensure success. The third option is impossible without compensation.

As two separate examples, let's take the television series "Firefly" and the novel "The Shining" by Stephen King. Firefly, commercially, was a failure. Blame whoever you want for this (most people choose to blame Fox), but the network wasn't making money with the show, so they pulled the plug on it. The show has gained a cult following in subsequent years, sold quite a few DVD box sets, and that allowed Joss Whedon to film "Serenity". Still, the distributor, FOX, didn't make money from it. But they thought they would. In a world where all media is free, "Firefly" would not exist, nor would any show you have ever seen on television, unless it had been funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which itself wouldn't have existed unless enterprising individuals had seen the profit potential in a broadcast medium known as television. It costs money to make a show like "Firefly", because it requires the time of a good number of people, and people like to be compensated for their time. This is a very simple equation.

"The Shining", unlike "Firefly", was the work of a single individual, Stephen King. In writing it, King moved his entire family to Colorado and lived off the money from previous books while writing the novel. Had King received no money for his previous works, he could not have written "The Shining", and in all likelihood, never would have started writing "The Shining" if there was no money to be made from it.

Let's return to music for a moment, because there's a perception that music is an easier medium to succeed in because it doesn't require the investment that film does, nor the time that literature does. It's also the medium that's currently undergoing the most radical shift in distribution. Radiohead released their seventh studio album, In Rainbows, as a free download on the Internet. Fans were encouraged to pay whatever they felt was an appropriate price for the download, and presumably, many people paid nothing. On the surface, this looks like a bold challenge to the current D&R model. Frontman Thom Yorke himself was quoted as saying, "I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one."

Paradigm shift? Hardly.

In an attempt to sound witty and progressive, Yorke ignored a few important details about their bold foray into distribution. First, Radiohead did enough research to determine that people would still buy physical CDs of the release once they were made available. This not only indicates that the desire for tangible product still exists, but since Radiohead's method of distributing CDs was to license the album to record companies, it proved that Radiohead still needed the recording industry for something. Second, Radiohead spent a considerable amount of time and money recording the album, time and money they would not have had if not for the six previous albums that EMI helped them make millions from. Third, while it seems like self-distribution is a great model for bands moving forward, there are only a handful of artists who can accomplish this, and all of them are artists who are in that position because of the existing structure of the industry.

The argument that music theory, home recording equipment, and Internet distribution outlets are readily available invalidates the argument that music should be bought and sold is a fallacy. "It is simply ridiculous to think that you can capture a sound from the air and charge for it." People paying for a song aren't paying for a sound captured from the air, any more than people paying for art are paying for colors strewn on a canvas, or people paying for basketball tickets are playing to watch some people run around and jump for an arbitrary period of time. People are paying for the quality of the song they're buying, the quality of the art, the skill of the basketball player.

What is "simply ridiculous" is the belief that the free dissemination of media will lead to anything but the complete collapse of not only the "media conglomerates", but quality media in general. Without the incentive of a financial reward, the only people who make music and write fiction and film movies will be those who do it solely because they enjoy it, and without the financial backing of a specialized entity, the quality of the material produced by those who do it solely because they love it will suffer. This is true of any venture, not just music. Businesses exist, grow, and thrive because they receive financial backing from investors and because the people who work for those businesses put in hard work with the hope of a substantial financial reward. Maybe someday in the future when capitalism is no longer the dominant economic system on the planet, this will change, but capitalism isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

"Artists who have relied on patronage in any of its forms for a career, regardless of how they may feel about the price charged for their music, will simply have little option but to give it away for free."

Wrong. They have another option. And that's to not make music to begin with.