By Rachel Chalmers
The Recording Industry Association of America has formed the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMA) in a bid to make music available in digital formats without relinquishing control over record labels’ intellectual property. The problem RIAA faces is the availability of music on the internet in the high quality audio compression format, MP3. MP3 is easy to copy and transmit, and there is no digital watermarking or other mechanism to distinguish legal copies from pirated editions of copyrighted work. Other audio compression formats are available which do include these copyright protections as standard, and MP3 itself can be made secure for copyrighted music. Right now, though, the various secure formats are incompatible. As RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen told a press conference in New York, up to now the recording industry has benefited from having one of the most standards-compliant marketplaces in the world. Consumers can be reasonably certain that any CD they buy will play on any CD player, no matter where they are on earth. If buyers of digital music are to have the same assurance, the different compression formats with copyright protection will have to interoperate. Ironically, it’s often the security aspects of new systems make them incompatible with other products, Rosen explained. SDMI is intended to be an open specification that all kinds of products can be built to accommodate. Rosen says SDMI will not single out one technology to become the new standard, but will try to create a level playing field where competition can flourish. We need copyright protection, she said, but we don’t want to stifle technology innovation. The goal is to create a music marketplace that spurs innovation so music lovers can have access to music. AOL, AT&T, IBM, Intel, Lucent, Matsushita, Microsoft, Sony and Toshiba have pledged their support to SDMI. In a move that surprised some observers, Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc has done likewise. Diamond and RIAA are embroiled in a lawsuit over Diamond’s Rio PMP300 player, which is rather like a Walkman for MP3s. RIAA has objected to the lack of copyright protection in the device’s original form. Diamond has in fact been bending over backwards to be seen to be a responsible member of the music industry and not a supporter of pirates, but the lawsuit appears to be galloping ahead regardless (CI No 3,551). For her part, Rosen says MP3 will have a place at the table with rival technologies like A2B and Liquid Music. Our hope is that with SDMI Artists who want to use MP3 and secure that format can prosper. To the extent that this initiative is successful, we hope that Diamond and other companies will be creating products that support the outcome, she told the press conference. However Diamond’s membership of SDMI is unlikely to affect the lawsuit. That’s a side issue, though, Rosen claims. She wants to make it clear that this is not an anti-MP3 or anti-piracy announcement. We are not here today complaining about piracy. I don’t think you see the record industry out there crying chicken little about piracy, she claimed. The point is to create an open architecture that will support many kinds of business models. We are not interested in locking up music forever. We are interested in achieving a reasonable balance between consumer access and artists rights. This is the critical framework necessary to create a new music market. Technology aside, the new market won’t look very different from the old one. In particular, the principal beneficiaries will be the same people who profit from music today – primarily the labels and only secondarily, if at all, the musicians. BMG Entertainment CEO Strauss Zelnick put it succinctly when he said that the point of SDMI is to: protect our artists and create incentives for people like us who invest in artists. Where artists and investors come into conflict, as when the hip hop band Public Enemy posted MP3s of its own music on its own sites, the record labels call the shots. Public Enemy was forced to withdraw the songs (CI No 3,553) (NBD 12/07/98). All the fancy rhetoric about respecting creativity aside, the bottom line is profits for the big corporations. My peers and I are all in agreement, said Sony Music Entertainment CEO Thomas Mottola. SDMI will enable all of us to conduct business in a safer and much more secure environment. SDMI will be convened on an ambitious schedule. Rosen hopes the first meeting will be before February, with the specification completed in time for compliant products to go on sale in the 1999 holiday season.
