Betsy Frederick betsy@silicon-desert.com

Celia Einhorn celia@pobox.com

http://www.challenge.nm.org/teachers/NECC_CSIT.html

The MP3 format is a compression system for music. The MP3 format helps reduce the number of bytes in a song without hurting the quality of the song's sound. The goal of the MP3 format is to compress a CD-quality song by a factor of 10 to 14 without losing the CD-quality sound. With MP3, a 32-megabyte (MB) song on a CD compresses down to about 3 MB. This lets you download a song in minutes rather than hours, and store hundreds of songs on your computer's hard disk without taking up that much space.

Is the music industry out of tune with the digital age? Are musicians greedy? Should music be free? What is the copyright law concerning intellectual property? What is fair use? Do today’s students "shoplift" music? How are new musicians introducing their music? Do people over 30 have a different take on this topic? MP3 suggests lessons for the music industry and for copyright issues.

Your local school board is meeting in about twenty minutes to decide whether or not the district should develop a policy restricting the use of MP3 files. The principals are concerned about liability. Teachers have just completed an in-service on being sensitive to student culture. Parents have different concerns about school influence on their children’s ethical education. The Board has invited parents, teachers, students and other shareholders to be in the audience.

Representatives from the music industry and consumers are going to make a presentation arguing in support or against the Board’s restricting the use of school hardware and networks for downloading and sharing MP3 files.

To prepare for this important meeting, each of you will attend a meeting of one of the constituent groups in the digital music controversy. Please maintain the integrity of your role so the simulation works. At the end of this preparation, choose one person to represent your role at the Board meeting.

Representatives from each group will argue for their constituents. After they present arguments, parents, students, and other audience members will query the representatives and express their own points of view.

• Grand Royal Records, home of the Beastie Boys, was the first label to use the streaming technology to promote its artists online.
• MP3 is about giving fans what they want and exposing people to good music.
• Artists online are conscientious of fans and their needs. They want to use this medium to thank fans for their loyalty and give something back with free copies of some of their music.
• We can advertise our new music to a large audience quickly and get great exposure.
• And in the end, it’s not about the money; it’s about the music.

• MP3 is allowing illegal and unrestricted copying and distribution of our client’s songs.
• Artists should get paid for their work. It’s a time-honored notion, but one that seems to be getting lost amid the MP3 buzz.
• It has been taboo for artists to speak out concerning the business side of their music. The fear has been that the buying public, as well as other artists, would perceive this concern as greed, and that the artists’ sole purpose for creating was the money. This perception has silenced many artists concerning MP3 and Napster. The silence must end.
• What disturbs me the most is that artists’ rights are never discussed. Most of the press coverage has framed the debate as "an argument between Internet groups and record companies. Artists just seem to be a ping-pong ball whacked back and forth.

• I helped the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) file a petition with the U.S. Copyright Office asking regulators to step in and establish royalty rates for downloading and streaming music online. Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is a consortium of record company and technology executives that is looking to develop specifications for secure music downloading that ostensibly could be part of any download technology.
• We say, "It’s Not the Technology, It’s the Theft."

• MP3 encourages copyright violation, since it allows users to share music files for free.
• We, the entertainment industry, have evidence demonstrating ongoing harm to CD sales, and harm to the emerging legitimate market for downloading music.
• We also claim that MP3 "leads to a devaluing of music, as MP3 teaches a generation of music consumers that artists do not deserve to be paid for their work, and their creative efforts are free for the taking."

16 year-old music lover who spends a good bit of his time online at http://themusiclover.com

• In my room, I have CDs, disks, 1000 MP3 files on my computer.
• I also have CD-Rs, recordable compact disks. I have dozens to burn with songs that are keepers.
• I love exploring new music, using legal sites and have no problem with the concept of paying for music.
• I hate digital rights management (DRM), the security systems being used to control how consumers can listen to music they legally purchase

• The copyright and licensing system is sometimes territorial-based and depends on how and where the music will be played," but the rules need to be reviewed because they do not apply to the Internet.
• The fair use exemption to the U.S. copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyright works without the permission of the author. It should not harm the commercial value of the work – in the sense of people no longer needing to buy it.
• Postings to the net are not granted to the public domain and don’t grant you any permission to do further copying except perhaps the sort of copying the person who did posting might have expected in the ordinary flow of the net.
• It’s a civil offense, punishable by fine, to distribute music that you don’t own the rights to. It’s a criminal offense to copy music illegally and then redistribute it for financial gain. You can go to jail for that. There is a great deal of uncertainty about how copyright laws should function in the digital world, but the laws themselves are clear.
• It is legal to download an MP3 to your hard drive and keep it there for 24 hours, but after that, the law says you must remove it.
• Most MP3 files are illegal. The exceptions are as follows:

Recorded works to which you personally own the copyrights.
Recorded works in the public domain.

How MP3 files Work
http://www.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm

Editorial Cartoons
http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/napster/

The Future of Music by Ram Samudrala, 1998-12-04
http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/music_future.html
        This is an interesting set of articles

MP3 Package from Web Monkey, Three Lessons: Legal and ethical issues, The music revolution, and The nuts and bolts
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/06/index1a.html

Overview Articles

Articles from USA Today
Fans, artists and industry: Nobody's rockin'
http://usatoday.com/usatonline/20020605/4166057s.htm

Money for nothing
http://usatoday.com/usatonline/20020605/4166024s.htm

Music world can mine Internet
http://usatoday.com/usatonline/20020605/4166072s.htm

The thrill is gone
http://usatoday.com/usatonline/20020605/4166026s.htm

Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2001, also known as the TEACH Act, would apparently cause profound changes in the law that now prohibits colleges and universities from performing audio-visual works, including videos, over the internet and other telecommunications systems without permission from the copyright holder.
http://www.stfrancis.edu/cid/copyrightbay/TEACHact.htm

MP3 On Campus + Ethics
http://ethics.acusd.edu/resources/cases/CaseDetail.asp?ID=35

Welcome to The Alliance of Ethical MP3 Professionals
http://www.thirdroad.com/AEMP3/

RIAA + Copyright
http://www.riaa.com/Copyright-What.cfm

Legality of MP3
http://www.mpex.net/en/info/legal.html

Fair Use and Copyright

Electronic Frontier Foundation on fair use
http://www.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.html

Legal and Ethical Issues
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/06/index1a.html?tw=multimedia

Electronic Frontier Foundation – Intellectual Property Issues and Policy Archive
http://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual_property
The Copyright Society of the U.S.A.

Napster's Legacy: Another Lawsuit
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111064,00.asp

No Rendezvous in Apples iTunes
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/techscience/story/0,4386,193722,00.html

Metallica sings a different tune on downloads
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/techscience/story/0,4386,193722,00.html

URL for the Powerpoint Cartoons
http://www.challenge.nm.org/teachers/cartoons.ppt