ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE, May 13, 1999.
A Chat with Mr. MP3
Can this man save the music business?
When the major players of the recording industry launched a group
called the Secure Digital Music Initiative in December, partisans
of the MP3 audio-format controversy greeted the move with hearty
derision. With the ambitious goals of creating a technical
standard for priacy-proof digital music files and enabling devices,
like portable players, to translate the files into music, SDMI
was seen by skeptics as a hopelessly belated response to the
popular (and easily pirated) MP3, already entrenched s the Net's
de facto audio standard. But then, in late February, Lionardo
Chiariglione was put in charge of SDMI and the scoffing quieted
considerably. Well regarded in high-geek circles, Chiariglione
is perhaps best known as the longtime head of the Moving Picture
Experts Group, from which emerged the MPEG1, Layer3 audio
standard - otherwise known as MP3. With Chiariglione at the
helm, an announced goal of having SDMI-approved gadgets on the
shelves by Christmas 1999 (once widely dismissed as wishful
thinking) now looms a possibility.
You are more or less responsible for the invention of the MP3
format. Why are you - and the record industry - now working so
hard to come up with a replacement for it?
MP3 was released in 1992, at a time when very few people knew of
the existence of the Internet and the Web, and PC's as powerful
as the Pentium were a long, long way to come. So the problem
has to do with two facts, basically. The first is that we have
now a ubiquitous network connecting tens of millions of people
around the world. the second is that the PC, starting from a
couple of years ago, has achieved a degree of processing power
that enables the real-time decoding of MP3-like files. These
two elements created the reason for the success of MP3, because
people say "OH, that's great - I rip off music from my CD, I
bring it to my computer, I compress it, I send it to my friends,
I post it on my private Web site, and people can download it."
All this was not part of the original design parameters of MP3.
In other words, what's missing is some form of built-in
protection against unrestricted copying of the record labels'
intellectual property?
Absolutely. What SDMI is designing is a system whereby, yes,
you buy the music - you buy it as a file contained in a physical
form [like a disc] or downloaded from a Web site, so you have
the ability to move that file from one player to another player.
but when you make a copy, you disable the original. Because
we want to avoid the fact that 1 million copies of a digital
file can be made without any degradation of quality.
What kinds of products will this system be built into?
This Christmas there will be portable devices that people can
use to download files, and they can ut them in their pockets
and walk and enjoy the music. In the longer term, which means
one year later, the idea is that consumers will be receiving
digital music via cable, via broadcast over the air, or from a
kiosk.
But that's assuming consumers end up choosing the SDMI
standard over MP3. What makes you so sure they'll prefer a
copy-protected format over one that lets them do whatever they
want with the music they buy?
Consumers like simple things. If you take the average music
consumer, this person likes to push a button and listen to the
music, and nothing else. So ease of use is overriding design
parameter of SDMI. If the ease of use in high and people can
have the total freedom of finding and getting the music they
want, for a price - which is what people do today when they buy
compact discs in the shops - well, then, I tell you: People are
going to adopt SDMI. - Julian Dibbell
LOOKS LIKE WE FIT THE BILL FOLKS. |
