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Record firms chase pirates MP3 opens the Net to CD-quality music By Larry Lange, EE Times Washington -- The key to sending large volumes of CD-quality music over the Internet or packing the equivalent of several commercial CDs onto a single platter may be at hand. But as often is the case in the anarchistic atmosphere of the cyber world, the hackers have gotten there first with the owners of the performances they are pirating in hot pursuit. The technology is a little known extension of an audio compression technique, known as MPEG-2 Audio Layer-3. And an underground community of students and hackers have become the first large-scale users of the technology by setting up hundreds, if not thousands, of so-called MPEG-3 or MP3 Internet sites where digital music spanning everything from Mozart to Marilyn Manson is being reproduced and distributed--free. The impressive 12:1 compression ratio of MP3 has made it a hot button on the Internet where MP3 players, encoders and "rippers"--programs for snatching a digital audio stream from a PC-based CD audio player--are readily available. However, the rapid growth of that pirating has also put the technology squarely in the sights of the recording industry. In the past few weeks the Recording Industry Association of America has stepped up its actions against the hackers, seeking temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions against three top Internet MP3 sites. "The educational steps we were taking with universities and the people posting these sites was only doing so much," said Frank Creighton who heads the RIAA's anti-piracy unit. "Even the cease-and-desist letters we were sending were only so effective--so we had to go to litigation. We needed to send a stronger message to say, 'We mean business.' " The RIAA's music cops have also stepped up their collaborative policing methods with the FBI, U.S. Customs, the Postal Service and the Secret Service. All this activity seems to be paying off in the short term but may cause further problems later. While Creighton pointed to the recent shotdown of some sites due to fear of similar litigation, some in the underground think that legal hassles will only exacerbate the problem. "We're in the middle of the new piracy revolution" said "Dead Addict," the nom de Net of a multimedia engineer at a large software corporation. He said he has a collection of hundreds of illegal MP3 files that he has written on to a personal collection of MP3 CDs. Clearly, the MP3 movement is a broad-based one that the RIAA may find difficult to stamp out. "Most MP3 sites are run by college students that live in dorms on campus," said Kris Henderson, a software engineering student at the University of Washington. He has a Web site called MP3.Net that contains no actual MP3 files but pointers to the top 100 sites that do. Since most colleges offer a free 10-Mbit/second Internet connection, it's relatively easy to set up a server on a computer. "If each college in the U.S. has just two or three students running a server from their computer," said Henderson, "it's clear that there are possibly 1,000 or more sites offering music for download." And worldwide there are thousands more. According to the RIAA, music pirates account for almost $300 million in lost record sales annually in the United States, and $2 billion worldwide. The group has not been able to say how much of those losses are coming specifically from MP3 piracy. It's easy to see why MP3 has proliferated so quickly. Literally all the music files, as well as the encoders and players, are free off the Net. Since MP3 files are compressed at a 12:1 ratio for CD-quality sound, that means that for the 60Mbytes required for a normal length song, MP3 compression can convert it into a single 5-Mbyte file. Henderson explained that a typical .wav file at 44 khz--CD quality--is approximately 10 Mbytes/minute, so a five-minute song would be 50Mb. "But with an MP3 file at 44 khz, CD quality is just under 1Mbyte per minute, making a five-minute MP3 file a little under 5Mbytes. "The advantages are obvious," he said: "CD quality sound in a small package." MP3 audio works by using "psycho-acoustic" compression, which removes extraneous information that human ears can't pick up. from the signal. According to Harold Papp, of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits--where Layer-3 was developed, the extension falls under the MPEG audio coding standard defined by the ISO/IEC. MPEG audio comprises three coding techniques: Layer-1, Layer-2 and Layer-3, called codecs. "These layers provide increasingly better audio quality at equal compression ratios, and with the advent of the MPEG-2 Layer-3 audio coding standard, the range of possible compression ratios was extended," said Papp. He explained that besides the 1:12 ratio for CD quality, there is a 1:24 similar to FM stereo quality; 1:48 at better than shortwave quality; and 1:96 for very low bit rate connections. "Because of these high compression ratios, Layer-3 is the supreme choice for all Internet audio transmissions," said Papp. Even the RIAA's Creighton conceded that "the quality on MP3 files is the best we've ever heard on the Internet. And what used to take an hour and a half to download on a 28.8 [-kbit/s] modem now takes about 5 minutes. You can make your own greatest-hits package in the course of an hour. You burn that to a CD-R [CD replication], and you're off and running." MP3 may be the most compelling compression scheme, but it's not the only technique in town. Other approaches for audio over the Internet-whether streaming or for downloading-have been available for some time, vying for the attention of the legitimate recording industry. Macromedia offers CD-quality streaming audio capability via its Shockwave plug-in for browsers; Progressive Networks has added a stereo upgrade of its RealAudio Player; and Liquid Audio, a newcomer formed by music-industry professionals, provides software for high-quality online audio. Both Progressive and Liquid Audio use Dolby-based AC-3 compression (audio coding). Weekly said that Liquid Audio is looking to incorporate the next MPEG file extension-Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which could technically be called Layer-4, or MP4. AAC is set to go into standardization in six months. Weekly said that all Internet studio players can be expected to adhere to the extension. But none of those techniques has caused anywhere near the stir surrounding MP3-based pirating. Long-term, one approach that may prove effective in slowing the illegal activity is the RIAA's notion of a marking system call a digital watermark. The idea is to take data that's written into a CD subchannel of CDs (the information about who owns the rights to the material) and embed it into the audio. But for now, the RIAA seems overwhelmed in dealing with the tsunami of illegal activity. Creighton of the RIAA went so far as to appeal to the pirates' sense of decency. "All we ask is that people get proper authorization to put MP3 files on the Net. "In some cases there may be some promotional value to this kind of thing, and the record company may not decide to charge you. Just pick up the phone." (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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