How Music Got Free (28 page)

twenty different patents
 . . . two dozen inventors
Information on mp3 patents comes from MP3licensing.com, interviews with Brandenburg and Linde, the European Patent Office, and my own tabulations.

Frankel did not bother to license the technology
Nullsoft would eventually become a Fraunhofer licensee, but not until after the popularity of the Winamp player was well established, and only under threat of litigation.

in the Constitution, no less
The exact text grants Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).

CHAPTER 8

A new manager was brought in from Denmark
Henning Jorgensen. He still lives in North Carolina.

something called the “crime triangle”
Known in scholarly sources as “routine activity theory.” Academic criminologists skip the triangle for a Venn diagram, with crime in the middle.

They were almost all guys
Of more than 100 Scene prosecutions I have researched, only two have involved female defendants. However, there was
for a brief period in the 1990s a releasing group known as GLOW: “Gorgeous Ladies of Warez.”

“Could you, like, FXP me the file, dogg?”
In the mid to late ’90s File eXchange Protocol was favored by IRC pirates over the more common File Transfer Protocol.

CHAPTER 9

a key driver for successful artists and businesspeople alike
From Iovine’s 2013 commencement speech at USC: “But what I have learned is some of these powerful insecurities can be harnessed into life’s greatest motivator, the strongest five-hour energy drink ever. It’s called a little old-fashioned fear.”

Iovine went after Sisqo
; Cohen went after Limp Bizkit
Goodman,
Fortune’s Fool
, 141.

“Big Pimpin’”
 . . . Carter would himself disown it
See John Jurgensen, “Just Asking: Decoding Jay-Z,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 21, 2010. He still performs the song, though.

confronted him on the floor of a nightclub and stabbed him
The producer was Lance “Un” Rivera. Carter pleaded guilty to the stabbing in 2001 and was sentenced to three years’ probation.

The estimated cost from 1995 to 2000 was half a billion dollars
A coalition of state attorneys general, led by Eliot Spitzer, later recouped $143 million in cash and trade product from the recording industry. As ever, the record labels admitted no wrongdoing.

Staffers downloaded the software
 . . .
Joseph Menn,
All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster
(New York: Crown Business, 2003), 164.

“Fuck the record industry.”
As recalled by Eileen Richardson, Napster’s former CEO. When a big-name recording artist later tried to strike a deal with Napster, Richardson said that John Fanning doubled down: “Fuck her, and fuck her million bucks.” Author interview.

Pressplay
 . . . listicles of the “Top All-Time Tech Busts”
See, for example, Dan Tynan, “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time,”
PC World
, May 26, 2006.

18 record companies, including Universal
A&M Records was listed first because the plaintiffs were ordered alphabetically.

Morris was the best-paid man in music
Sony’s Tommy Mottola was also very well compensated, but stepped down in 2003.

the average American spending over $70 a year on CDs alone
RIAA figures and my calculations. Inspired by Michael Degusta’s excellent analysis of the recording industry’s historical earnings mix. See “These Charts Explain the REAL Death of the Music Industry,”
Business Insider
, February 18, 2011.

CHAPTER 10

Inside the company a civil war had broken out
Frank Rose, “The Civil War Inside Sony,”
Wired
, November 2002.

“led the development of a standard means
 . . . called MP3”
Charles C. Mann, “The Heavenly Jukebox,”
Atlantic
, September 2000.

“the father of the mp3”
Mark Boal, “Leonardo’s Art,”
Brill’s Content
, August 2000.

59 million dollars
SEC filings show Frankel owned 522,661 shares of AOL stock, then trading at $112.

“widespread adoption of the standard on the Internet”
2001 Fraunhofer Annual Report.

“Do not steal music”
See, for example, Brandenburg’s keynote lecture, Techfest 2012, IIT Bombay, India.

Fraunhofer made their feelings known to the device manufacturers
Chris “Monty” Montgomery, who led the development of the Ogg standard, later called these kinds of actions a “protection racket.” Open-source advocate Eben Moglen observed that “an accusation of infringement has no legal weight, so there is no real downside to making such a claim.” For more, see Jake Edge, “Xiph.org’s ‘Monty’ on Codecs and Patents,”
Lwn.net
, November 9, 2011.

CHAPTER 11

The document that outlined the methodology for encoding and distributing Scene mp3s
Historical Scene releasing standards for a variety of media can currently be found at Scenerules.irc.gs.

he wasn’t interested in mind-numbing discussions about the relative merits of constant and variable bit rates
But you are, aren’t you? Fraunhofer’s earliest mp3 encoding used the same number of bits per second throughout the entire encoding process—even during parts of the song that could be represented with very little information. This was
constant
bit rate encoding. In the late 1990s, researchers at an audio software company called Xing realized it would be better to use more bits for the most complex parts of a song and fewer for the least. This was called
variable
bit rate encoding, and Xing introduced an mp3 encoder with this capability. Most mp3s today use variable.

“black redneck”
Facebook comment left on a picture of Glover with the Quad Squad.

charged with felony embezzlement
Chaney Sims later pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property, a misdemeanor.

CHAPTER 12

“a bunch of drunken sailors nursing a hangover”
Frank Pellegrini, “What AOL Time Warner’s $54 Billion Loss Means,”
Time
, April 25, 2002.

up to 40 gigabytes of storage
The third-generation iPod, released April 2003.

“people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”
Andy Reinhardt, “Steve Jobs on Apple’s Resurgence: Not a One-Man Show,”
BusinessWeek
, May 12, 1998.

They were “educational”
Carlos Linares, the RIAA’s designated expert witness for file-sharing prosecutions, repeatedly used this term to describe the lawsuits in conversation with me.

CHAPTER 13

targeting companies like Grokster, LimeWire, and Kazaa
In 2011, during its lawsuit against LimeWire, the RIAA filed a brief seeking damages of up to $75 trillion—more than the GDP of the entire world.

a deliberate, earsplitting fake
Known as “spoofing,” this was a short-lived attempt by the RIAA to degrade the value of the peer-to-peer sites by filling them with bogus files.

The Pirate Bay’s founders loved controversy
For more on them, see the excellent crowdfunded documentary
TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard
, directed by Simon Klose (Nonami, 2013), legally available as a torrent.

“. . . please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons”
The response was posted to the Pirate Bay’s website in August 2004 and signed, “Polite as usual, Anakata.” Anakata is Svartholm Warg’s screen name.

University of Teesside
Today known as Teesside University.

Ellis was becoming a quality snob
To be specific, he insisted on mp3s with a minimum variable bit rate of 192 kbps or higher.

He permitted only mp3s ripped from the original compact discs
Ellis would later open this to rips from cassette tapes, vinyl records, and Web streams.

CHAPTER 14

the distinction of leaking the remix to “Ignition”
Kelly himself had leaked the first verse of the song weeks earlier, breaking off listeners with a little preview to the remix. He did not usually do this.

Now 18 APC members were facing felony-level conspiracy charges
Seventeen of them reached plea bargain deals. The lone holdout, Barry Gitarts, was found guilty at trial and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

“. . . We are not here to line the pockets of bootleggers”
From the NFO for EGO’s 2002 leak of the Dixie Chicks’
Home
.

CHAPTER 15

Warner
 . . . had been taken over by Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
For a book-length treatment, see Goodman’s
Fortune’s Fool
.

a calcified corporate shell called the Entertainment Distribution Company
EDC was eventually acquired by Glenayre Technologies, a wireless messaging firm. Glenayre would then take the EDC name.

Morris
 . . . now publicly vented against Apple
See
Billboard,
“Red Hot Chili Peppers, QOTSA, T.I. Rock for Zune,” November 11, 2006. His exact words
were: “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, so it’s time to get paid for it.” The remarks came as Morris was himself trying to get into the mp3 player market. In exchange for providing licenses to sell its music, Morris negotiated for Microsoft to pay Universal a percentage for every Zune it sold. Since the Zune tanked, this amounted to almost no money, but a similar deal with Apple would have made him a fortune.

his critics in the digital era
Chief among these was Bob Lefsetz, author of the Lefsetz Letter, a widely followed industry blog. Morris referred to him as a “chirping bird.”

“Females 18–24, all Black”
Email sent July 11, 2003, requesting the campaign, submitted as evidence by the New York State Attorney General’s Office. The cost of this fakery was $1,750.

“we are hiring a request company
 . . . to jack TRL for Lindsay”
Email sent June 18, 2005, submitted as evidence by the New York State Attorney General’s Office. The names of the sender and recipient of the email are redacted.

selling songs that even their creators acknowledged were not very good
The situation was especially bad for established acts. Joe Walsh, formerly the guitarist of the Eagles, recalled the pressure from the suits for a follow-up to the band’s top-selling
Greatest Hits
album: “The record company didn’t care if we farted and burped. It was all: when can we have it? They would put that out, because that was their whole corporate quarter.”
History of the Eagles
, directed by Alison Ellwood (Jigsaw Productions, 2013).

Wayne got weird
For more on this period in Wayne’s life, see
The Carter,
directed by Adam Bhala Lough (QD3 Entertainment, 2009).

“The mixtapes were obviously very concerning to us as a label
 . . .”
Knopper,
Appetite
, 247.

What if
 . . . the FBI started leaking albums themselves?
The idea is floated in Patrick Saunders’ FBI case file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The idea is killed by the Computer Crimes section’s senior counsel, citing experience with industry contacts. It is unclear from the heavily redacted file if the FBI had ever done this before.

CHAPTER 16

Pink Moon
had sold more copies than
 . . . in the previous quarter century
See “Rock Star Back from the Dead,”
Birmingham Post
(UK), April 7, 2000.

an alphabet soup of file types—FLAC
Free Lossless Audio Codec, an open-source standard from the same group that developed Ogg. Because it does not use psychoacoustic methods, it achieves compression rates of only 60–70 percent. However, as it is a lossless encoder, the original audio can be reconstructed from the compressed file.

“the world’s greatest record store”
Ben Westhoff, “Trent Reznor and Saul Williams Discuss Their New Collaboration, Mourn OiNK,”
Vulture
, October 30, 2007. Reznor went on to explain that he remained a patron of the arts, and had paid Radiohead $5,000 for his copy of
In Rainbows
.

He used the music-tracking site Last.fm
Ellis’ Last.fm account has since been deleted.

“second enclosure of the commons”
James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain” (Creative Commons, 2003).

“The TUBE BAR prank calls
 . . .”
Email submitted as trial evidence.

“there was nothing left to upload”
Similar complaints may be found today on What.cd.

CHAPTER 17

The beef had made the cover of
Rolling Stone
Evan Serpick, “Kanye vs. 50 Cent,”
Rolling Stone
, September 6, 2007.

a coworker pulled him aside
Jerry Swink, a maintenance worker at the plant.

CHAPTER 18

only one
 . . . had been brought to a jury trial
Several other defendants would later take their cases to trial. They all lost.