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BMG Offers
Legal Song Sharing By Frank Ahrens BMG Entertainment plans to
release a compact disc today that allows consumers to download and copy a
limited number of songs, the music industry's latest experiment to come up with
a viable alternative to the free trading of music over the Internet. R&B singer Anthony
Hamilton's "Comin' From Where I'm From," which BMG label Arista will
price at $13.98, is a CD designed to play differently on a computer than on
home and car stereos, Walkmans, boomboxes and so forth. When consumers pop Hamilton's
CD into their stereos, they should notice no difference from any other CD. But
when they load it into their computers, an interactive box will appear on the
screen that shows Hamilton's picture, a list of 12 songs and several options
for users to click on. One option allows the consumer
to copy all of Hamilton's songs from the CD onto the computer and portable
devices, such as MP3 players (but not yet Apple's iPod). Once in the computer,
the software lets the consumer copy the songs on up to three CDs. There is
nothing to prevent those CDs from being recopied, though the next generation of
the software will include such copy protection. Another option allows the
consumer to copy Hamilton's songs into an e-mail that can be sent to others via
the Internet, where the music can be downloaded to a hard drive for 10 days
before expiring. "I think there is a market
where the virtual world and the physical world can peacefully coexist,"
said Jordan Katz, senior vice president for sales at Arista, which spent the
past two years testing the new CD format. "As long as there is a physical
product, and there will be for a very long time, I think it's the right thing
to make sure we protect artists' rights and at the same time be very, very
conscious of what the general public and consumers want out of music." Each of the five major music
companies -- Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music
Entertainment, EMI and BMG -- has experimented with various forms of copy
protection on their CDs, and released some discs here and in Europe in recent
years. But technology so far has mainly focused on keeping the music on the
disc, as opposed to managing it in such a way that tries to protect copyright
while giving the consumer some flexibility with the music. Other music companies are
waiting to see what happens with BMG's experiment, to find out how well it is
received by consumers and if the technology can be easily hacked. The first
test will be how quickly one of Hamilton's songs appears on a song-swapping Web
site such as Kazaa, Grokster or Morpheus. The music industry is suffering
through a double-digit depression in CD sales over the past few years, which it
attributes to free song sharing via Internet sites. The industry trade group,
the Recording Industry Association of America, is spearheading an aggressive
and wide-ranging legal defense, backing hundreds of lawsuits against song
sharers, claiming damages due to copyright violation. But the industry has been
heavily criticized for suing without offering consumers workable alternatives
to free song swapping on the Internet. In recent months, Internet sites outside
the music industry, such as Apple's iTunes and BuyMusic.com, have begun
offering digital downloads for as low as 79 cents per song and have experienced
modest success. This is not the first time BMG,
owned by German media giant Bertelsmann AG, has broken ranks with the other big
four music companies. Bertelsmann had made an investment in Napster and later
tried to buy the name out of bankruptcy. Hamilton's CD was picked
because it was the one scheduled for release when SunnComm Technologies Inc.'s
software was ready, Katz said. BMG signed a two-year deal with Phoenix-based
SunnComm, allowing the music company to apply SunnComm's MediaMax technology to
any of BMG's releases, SunnComm chief executive Peter H. Jacobs said.
BMG/Arista will monitor sales of Hamilton's CD to decide what tweaks may be
needed for future discs, and when similar ones will be released. Sony and Santa Clara,
Calif.-based Macrovision Corp. also are working on CD copy-management
technology. Macrovision signed a deal in April to provide copy protection for
Microsoft's Windows Media Player. With BMG's new CD, which will
ship 100,000 copies initially, the number of downloads and copies is still
determined by BMG, not the consumer, which may not sit well with some file sharers. "People may say, 'Why
would you restrict me to three copies?' " said William H. Whitmore, chief
operating officer of SunnComm. "Well, we could have made it zero copies.
You have to balance your rights and privileges versus your obligations and responsibilities." © 2003 The Washington Post Company Charles Mims |
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