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The record industry battles online music piracy.
When the Recording Industry Association of America, the music biz watchdog group, announced last December the Secure Distribution of Music Initiative (an attempt to stem the growing tide of online music piracy and copyright infringement), the effort seemed to some critics like a classic case of too little too late.
After all, the rapid proliferation of Web sites offering free, unauthorized downloads of music files in a format called MP3-a near CD-quality audio format that's both super-compressed and easily transmittable-had practically turned an entire generation of do-it-yourself Web publishers-especially techsavvy college students-into online music pirates, virtually overnight.
Skeptics likened RIAls SDMI proposal to asking music labels to stick their proverbial fingers into the proverbial crack in the dike. The only problem was, the dam had long since burst open and the deluge was already in progress. No amount of standardization, critics scoffed, could mop up the tidal wave of illegally distributed MP3 files, both from a technical and regulatory perspective, as SDMI aims to do.
So why did MP3 suddenly seem to burst on the scene? "MP3 wasn't originally designed for transmitting music over the Internet," explains Arnold Brown, president and CEO of San Francisco's Audio Explosion, which this week will launch MJuice, the first encrypted security system for delivering MP3 files over the Web. "But it's amazing what consumers will do to get what they want."
But the RIAA is trying to pick up its pace to catch up with the MM juggernaut. On February 26, two months after the announcement of the SDMI, the RIAA convened a meeting in Los Angeles to create the committee that would...