Key Pages
- |Changes [Feb 26, 2009]
The cameraIn 1987, a team of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen in Germany set out to create a method of digital audio formatting based off of the standards set by the Moving Picture Experts’ Group for compressing video files in order to be sent over low-bandwidth internet connections. Little did the team know that their clever new method of compressing sound, the MPEG-1 Layer III or mp3, would within a decade drastically change the way people used co-developing digital computer and communications technologies and challenge widely held cultural conventions about property and ownership.
As previously mentioned, the technical beginnings of the mp3 format lay in the desire to create a method of audio only digital compression that was compatible with pre-existing standards of encoding digital media. Governed by and spawned from the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechinical Commission, or ISC/IEC, the Moving Picture Experts’ Group was created in 1988 with “the aim to develop standards for coded representation of moving pictures, audio and their combination.” While originally comprised of 25 members, the MPEG committee now has over 300 members from over 20 countries attending the three or more annual meetings, depending on how immediately new standards must be agreed upon.
The first standard to emerge from MPEG, MPEG-1, was declared in 1992 and was officially “the standard for storage and retrieval of moving pictures and audio on storage media.” Two years later the MPEG-2 standard for digital television was agreed upon, and the MPEG-4 format for multimedia applications originally emerged in 1998 and was then revised in 1999. The Fraunhofer algorithm for creating mp3 files, however, was integrated into the MPEG-1 standard from its onset and the process finally earned a United States patent in 1996 after holding one in Germany for the previous seven years. Soon, the affordances of this new digital standard in audio compression would take the music industry by storm.
Sources:
"The History of the mp3 and how did it all begin?" http://www.mp3-mac.com/Pages/History_of_MP3.html
"What is mp3, how does it work, what is MPEG?" http://www.mp3-mac.com/Pages/What_is_MP3.html
The mp3 works simply by recognizing that the human ear does not realize all of the frequencies present in an audio recording. While the maximum range of human hearing lies between 20Hz and 20KHz, the ear is most sensitive to those frequencies between 2KHz and 4KHz. By filtering out all of the undetectable noises and frequencies, the mp3 achieves CD quality sound in one tenth to one twelfth the file size of an equivalent AIFF or WAV version of the file. However, this also means that once these frequencies have been eliminated from the recording, they can never be replaced back into the file.
Luckily, when an mp3 file is created by compressing a more robust file type, there is a range of compression quality that is inversely proportional to the size of the resulting file. For example, an mp3 can be created with 128Kbit compression to reach near CD quality, but the resulting file will be larger than if the encoder had chosen a 56Kbit or even 96Kbit compression. Regardless of what level of compression used, the mp3 file is still a fraction of the size than the same recording presented in classic, uncompressed WAV or AIFF form. The small amount of hard disk space occupied by a compressed mp3 file is what makes the format so desirable among digital music collectors; not only can one store hundreds and even thousands of audio recordings on a reasonable amount of hard drive space, but transferring the recordings from one computer to another takes relatively no time at all compared to the bulky WAV/AIFF iterations of the file.
This ease of transferability of the mp3 format is what has contributed most heavily to anti-mp3 sentiment among much of the modern music industry. Along with increased access to the internet, higher bandwidth connections, and the proliferation of compression software, downloading challenged the store-bought album as the preferred method of music acquisition. However, a significant portion of downloading is done without compensation for the creators of the file, or the recording from which the file is made. While some parties, namely the music and film industries, assert that the means of creating, storing, and distributing copyrighted material must be controlled in order to preserve the intellectual property of musicians and filmmakers, others argue that industrial definitions of ‘copyright’ and ‘property’ have no meaning in the age of the mp3.
Source:
"What is mp3, how does it work, what is MPEG?" http://www.mp3-mac.com/Pages/What_is_MP3.html
In 2004, the entertainment industry backed a congressional bill known as the Induce Act that would allow copyright holders “to sue people who they think encourage copyright violation by creating technologies that enable piracy,” as Sarah McBride explains in an article for The Wall Street Journal. While the Act was specifically designed to target makers of peer-to-peer software employed by the majority of pirates, companies in many industries vehemently oppose the bill out of fear that they could be held liable for individuals using their products to violate copyrights.
As such, an industry group known as the Consumer Electronics Association that represents producers of electronic goods is working to narrow the scope of the proposed law and make a clear distinction between peer-to-peer firms that rely on mass copyright infringement for commercial viability and legitimate electronics companies. The U.S. Copyright Office is taking an entirely opposite approach and advocating a broad reach of the Act that can hold producers and distributors of technologies that may be used in pirating accountable for any such acts. For example, under this expansive version of the bill, if an iPod is found to be storing mp3 files that violate copyright, the author of the stolen information may sue Apple for making the iPod, Best Buy for selling the iPod, and even Toshiba for making the hard drive that allows the iPod to store electronic files.
Lawrence Lessig's 2004 book Free Culture takes a much different approach to the issue of digital piracy than the supporters of the Induce Act. In the book, Lessig argues that the contemporary business model for the music recording industry is based around a form of piracy that exploits the creativity of musical artists in order to benefit both the record producers as well as the public. By providing the example of how a revision to the Copyright Act in 1909 adapted the law to work within the framework of the era's evolving musical reproduction technology, Lessig suggests that a similar adaptation to current copyright law must be made in order to facilitate the legitimate uses of peer-to-peer technology.
While groups like the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA as it is commonly referred to, blame lagging CD sales on the proliferation of peer-to-peer piracy, Lessig shows that piracy is not the lone cause of declining profits. "In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent." Lessig goes on to explain how these RIAA reported numbers answer their own hypothetical question regarding the difference between stealing an album from a record store or downloading one from the Internet: "If I steal a CD, then there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely clear that the same is not true of downloads. If every download were a lost sale...then the industry would have suffered a 100 percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop. If 2.6 times the number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, and yet sales revenue dropped by just 6.7 percent, then there is a huge difference between 'downloading a song and stealing a CD.'"
While Lessig does agree that some form of property protection must be maintained in the digital era, he argues that information creators must be allowed to use common sense reasoning to decide what level of protection they want their property to be protected under. For example, if a musical artist wants to give away their music for free with in the hope of generating interest in their art, they should not be limited in doing so because of record producers preserving their own interests in the artist's property. Similarly, take the example of Free Culture itself: it is published under a Creative Commons License that permits reproduction for non-commercial purposes as long as the work is attributed to Lawrence Lessig, like I am doing right now.
Here is a link to the PDF version of Free Culture: http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
And here is a link to the Creative Commons License homepage, which includes information about how to publish under the license: http://creativecommons.org/
