 
By Eliot Van Buskirk
If you missed the previous 64 MP3 Insider columns, here's a preposterously compressed summary of online music so far. Once upon a time, people bought music--on shiny discs and other media--in stores. Then the Internet introduced music fans to online distribution, of which they could not get enough. Instead of trying to use this new medium to increase music sales and widen distribution, the RIAA and major labels lobbied Washington and brought lawsuits to fight the Internet. But this lobbying may no longer even be necessary, thanks to a recent ruling that circumvents pesky little things such as our Constitutional right to privacy and a fair trial in the name of--what else--short-term corporate earnings.
Senior editor, CNET Reviews (1/27/03) I'm referring to the RIAA vs. Verizon case, in which U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled that an ISP had to turn over the name of a subscriber found by the RIAA to be sharing 666 copyrighted files. Bates's decision means that ISPs are now responsible for monitoring the traffic that flows through their networks and enforcing copyright law at the behest of content owners. If you're even suspected of sharing content without the permission of the copyright holder, you will be summarily booted from your ISP without a chance to defend yourself. Financial and personal costs associated with losing your Internet connection would be, of course, your problem. Ultimately, one could be blacklisted from all ISPs, à la Kevin Mitnick, who was just recently allowed back onto the Internet after having been banned for about eight years as a result of his hacking exploits. Take my rights, please Large corporations now have authority over what the Netizens of this country can and cannot do, regardless of the fact that the Constitution stands firmly opposed to this sort of thing. One has to wonder whether the labels will breathe a sigh of relief and abandon their much-vaunted plans to sell music electronically since they now won't have to compete or negotiate with free music-distribution services--they can merely disconnect file-sharers from their ISPs en masse. Thankfully, Verizon is appealing the decision on the grounds that its customers deserve the rights to privacy and due process afforded them by the Constitution. But even if that appeal fails and the decision stands, all might not be lost. After all, we've seen people work around impediments to file sharing in the past. For example, the Gnutella network features many more files and users than it did when Napster and Audiogalaxy were around. Yankee ingenuity An Ipsos-Reid study of last summer showed that about one-fifth of all Americans (roughly 40 million people) had used file-sharing services--quite a consensus. I believe that most of those folks would gladly pay a fair price, say $10 to $20 per month, for a trustworthy file-sharing network. But the music industry stands opposed to the compulsory licensing that would allow that situation to happen, starting from when Napster originally asked it for such a deal. Therefore, Internet users are getting used to circumventing blockades to access music in the way that they want to. Recent examples of this phenomenon include the new crop of services that cut out the adware (which shows popup ads on your desktop) and the spyware (which sells information about you or attempts to alter your surfing behavior) from file-sharing clients. One of these apps, KaZaa Lite, is identical to KaZaa in every way except for the fact that it won't track your surfing methods, bombard you with locally spawned pop-up windows, or otherwise annoy you. But perhaps a more appropriate example is eMule, an open-source clone of eDonkey2000. Unlike most file-sharing clients, eMule was created not by a company trying to get rich pirating music while selling user data but by a loose affiliation of software developers working for free to solve a problem. If the RIAA vs. Verizon decision stands, true P2P and open-source technologies--networks, software, and even ISPs--will become very attractive to users seeking privacy. Since any corporate entity now has to hand over users' private information at the behest of whatever other corporation wants it, open-source solutions look better and better; with them, there's no company to sue for the information. We might even see a second Internet arise, based on distributed P2P architecture rather than the centralized system of logging into an ISP for access. People who would like to retain some semblance of privacy, and those who prefer not to have unelected corporate authorities dictate the terms of their Internet use, would flock to such a service. The gloves are off A far more plausible possibility is that people will learn to disguise their activities from their ISP. The other day, I spoke with David Campbell, president, chairman, and founder of Punch Networks. Punch gives us a glimpse at the sort of cloaking that consumers might use in the future to communicate privately. Punch Networks offers online lockboxes for the storage of sensitive information. The content in the lockbox can be synced to any number of computers, which helps law firms and other such organizations keep their documents accessible, updated, and, most importantly, secure. The company recently began planning an MP3 service, which consumers can use to sync their music collections on two different computers over the Internet. Since files are transferred to the Punch lockbox over a secure HTTPS stream, ISPs won't have any idea whether the traffic represents a bunch of self-penned Word documents or a collection of copyrighted MP3s. Even more interestingly, you can give your account's password to whomever you want. Your friends and family can sync their own music to the collection, and their tunes will automatically copy to your hard drive. This service costs $100 for one year of access to a 100MB lockbox--enough space for a rotating cast of 20 to 40 MP3s. Certainly, some people will use Punch and other such secure data-syncing services to trade copyrighted MP3s, but not one penny of that money will go to copyright holders since the files cannot be tracked and Punch promises confidentiality to its clients. This reveals the ultimate folly of the record industry's litigious approach to file sharing: driving it underground where it cannot be tracked. Instead, the labels should embrace the Internet and offer compulsory licenses to P2P companies so that such sites can offer paid file sharing in a legal manner. Besides trampling our Constitutional rights, the record industry's lawsuit will only hurt it in the end by driving people to secure, harder-to-track file-sharing networks. Obviously, people really like trading MP3s. Many folks--perhaps even the vast majority of them--would pay for the right to do so, whether the money goes to secure file-syncing networks such as Punch Networks (which give no money to rights holders), or an RIAA-approved service that compensates copyright owners using funds gathered through a compulsory-licensing rate. The record labels need to decide whether they want a slice of the online-music pie. I have a hard time believing that the music industry would rather let someone else collect the money generated by file sharing, but that's exactly the option it's choosing by pursuing such lawsuits as RIAA vs. Verizon.  MP3 Nugget: Mood music made easy
Many of us have gigabytes of music sitting on our hard drives and need more ways to slice and dice the songs into playlists. For some, MoodAmp is the answer. This app scans your hard drive for MP3s and lets you rate each song by emotion (angry, energetic, happy, in love, neutral, relaxed, romantic, sad, or working) and your own preference (awesome, good, normal, or bad). Once you have all of your tunes categorized, you can sort files using these attributes. Because MoodAmp relies on only your own judgment, it can work better than ham-handed services that attempt to classify your music for you and inevitably screw things up. Like all MP3 Nugget software, MoodAmp is completely free to use, but Winamp or Windows Media Player is required.
 Download MoodAmp now
Senior Editor Eliot Van Buskirk covers portable audio and music-related issues for CNET Reviews. Have a question for him? Let him know!
  Hilary Rosen resigns from the RIAAShe says it's because she has to take care of her kids, but rumor has it that the four-year head of the RIAA is sick of standing up for a record industry that's too stubborn to adapt to reality. Either way, we applaud her decision. Yahoo's article  Robbie Williams's label relationshipThe popular British tunesmith said that he thinks file sharing is "great," though his label, manager, and accountants would beg to differ. The BBC's article RealPlayer's sneaky installerEvidently, RealPlayer has a trick up its sleeve that gets users to consent to spam. This tactic involves hiding four grayed-out check boxes at the bottom of a scroll-down menu during installation. Post on Yale's LawMeme site Another amazing acoustic identifierThis past year has seen leaps and bounds in the field of acoustic song identification, in which an algorithm figures what song is playing by analyzing the sound. Rather than using an ID3 tag or other digital identifier, this technology names songs after you hum a few bars into a microphone! Yahoo's article iCommune swatted by AppleA guy named James Speth wrote a piece of software called iCommune for turning iTunes into a file-sharing client, giving the Mac community a brief glimpse of what life could be like if compulsory licenses were available for sharing music online. CNET News.com's story
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