SPEAKING as a pirate, Bucharest is my kind of town. Walk round the city
centre on a Saturday afternoon and the government-owned department stores are
closed, but outside on the streets, stalls sell pirate music cassettes and CDs
for a couple of dollars. For just a little more, there are pirate CD-ROMs
containing thousand-dollar libraries of PC software.
At one popular restaurant, waiters serve food while other people bring round
trays of pirate discs. 鈥淲hat kind of music do you like?鈥� they ask, before
scurrying off to bring a selection of jazz, rock or opera discs. The police look
the other way.
People tend to associate the pirate trade with Eastern Europe and the Far
East, but we鈥檙e making inroads everywhere. In September, at the European
Computer Trade Show in London, a company was selling a device that hooks up to a
Sony PlayStation and plays pirate game discs. What鈥檚 more, the stand was in
full view of Sony and the publishers of PlayStation games.
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Fortunately for us, the record, video and computer games industries have
traditionally been run by executives who understand nothing of the technology
on which their livelihoods depend. Their talent is in selling鈥攁nd
lunching. They are always several steps behind the smart brains in the black
economy. So long as consumers insist on being able to copy their music and
programs, there will always be an avenue for us to exploit. And the one decision
that the executives could take to kill us off, they refuse to make.
Piracy got its big break in the 1960s when Philips launched the first cheap
audio cassette. Before that, tape only came on bulky spools and had to be laced
through the complicated mechanism of a tape recorder. Philips鈥檚 compact cassette
did away with all that and, overnight, copying music became a doddle.
It didn鈥檛 take the recording industry long to see the danger. When the
Beatles founded the company Apple, they hired a colourful Greek character called
鈥淢agic Alex鈥� Mardas. Together they hatched a plan to put a 鈥渟poiler鈥� signal on
the Beatles鈥檚 next album, Sergeant Pepper. The record would play
normally, but anyone who tried to copy it onto a blank cassette would find their
recording ruined.
Magic Alex added a 20-kilohertz tone to the music, a frequency just above
human hearing. But when the signal was copied onto tape, it interfered with the
similarly high 鈥渂ias frequency鈥� which analogue tape recorders use to mobilise
the magnetic particles in recording tape. The two signals produced a lower 鈥渂eat
frequency鈥� that sounded like a whistle.
Although the spoiler worked in the lab, with engineers who wanted it to work
using high-quality equipment, the real world is nothing like this ideal. Needles
on domestic record players ignored the signal, often physically destroying the
delicate groove in the vinyl that produced the spoiler. Even if the stylus did
read the signal, it was usually filtered out by unwanted capacitance and
inductance in the connecting leads. So people who bought Sergeant
Pepper found that it copied perfectly. Apple and Magic Alex abandoned their
idea.
Twenty years ago, we pirates had another lucky break when Sony鈥檚 founder,
Akio Morita, decided to market his Walkman personal stereo. To everyone鈥檚
surprise, the recorder-that-does-not-record was a runaway success. After years
of releasing pitifully few, poorly recorded music cassettes, record companies
started issuing music on high-quality cassettes. What a golden opportunity!
Music lovers could use a couple of machines to copy each other鈥檚 tapes. But
pirates like yours truly bought roomfuls of decks and mass-produced cassettes to
sell.
The home video recorder revolution proved even more profitable. As if to
encourage piracy, the Hollywood studios initially refused to release cinema
movies for home viewing. And because television broadcasters and talent unions
could not agree on royalty deals, TV programmes did not make it onto tape,
either.
So cans of film were 鈥渂orrowed鈥� from projection rooms overnight and
transferred to videotape for mass-copying. For a decade, the only way to watch
Fawlty Towers on video鈥攗nless you had recorded it off
air鈥攚as to buy an unauthorised copy made from master tapes 鈥渓iberated鈥�
from the BBC鈥檚 vaults. When the movie studios and broadcasters finally saw sense
and started to release their own tapes, it was more good news for us. We just
bought a bank of VCRs to make extra copies of original cassettes.
But then for the first time, disaster loomed. In the early 1980s, an Irish
inventor called John Ryan patented a way to make videotapes uncopyable. To keep
their image steady, TV sets rely on synchronisation pulses that are woven into
the picture signals. Ryan鈥檚 Macrovision system adds spurious pulses to these
signals. These extra pulses are ignored by TV sets, but upset the circuitry in
video recorders, making any back-to-back copy unplayable.
Fortunately, not all movie studios want to pay the technology royalties for
Macrovision, so they cross fingers and do without it. And no self-respecting
pirate would now be without one of the 鈥渟ignal cleansers鈥� that sit in between
two video recorders and strip out Macrovision鈥檚 pulses.
The advent of digital technology should have sounded the death knell for
piracy. It鈥檚 true that the rewards are potentially greater because, unlike
analogue copies, a digital dub or 鈥渃lone鈥� is the same quality as the original.
There is no degradation. But digital systems make it easier to set up
anti-copying controls鈥攁t least in theory. Thankfully, record companies are
often their own worst enemies.
The first proposal for a digital audiotape (DAT) recorder emerged in the
mid-1980s. A single cassette the size of a matchbox would carry several music
CDs. In a masterstroke of miscalculation, the music industry rallied behind an
anti-copying system called Copycode, invented by CBS, which removed narrow bands
of frequencies from the sound spectrum. While listeners should not be able to
hear these 鈥渘otches鈥�, circuitry inside a DAT recorder would recognise them and
refuse to record the music.
Trade bodies such as the International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI) and the Recording Industries Association of America, threw
their weight behind the system. New laws would be needed around the world to
force electronics companies to install Copycode circuitry into their recorders.
But they never appeared. The electronics companies knew that the public would
not buy recorders that would not record. Worse, a committee of experts that was
asked by the US government to test the system concluded that it spoilt the
music. Copycode bit the dust.
Floored, representatives of the music industry and electronics companies met
in Athens in June 1989. They agreed to support new digital formats that used
something called the Serial Copy Management System. SCMS adds a digital flag to
a clone. When a recorder detects this flag on a piece of music, it refuses to
record it again. This allows home users to make copies of their favourite CDs
and prevents clones from being cloned.
Oh how we laughed. SCMS does nothing to stop pirates making an infinite
number of copies from the same original. CD recorders, costing a few hundred
dollars, make perfect clones of music on blank CDs that cost less than a
dollar.
And it gets better鈥攖hanks to the increasingly blurred boundary between
consumer electronics and home computing. CD-ROM recorders for PCs are even
cheaper than music CD recorders. They are designed to let PC users make back-up
copies of their own data, but can equally well be used to copy PC software
straight from a CD-ROM. The street vendors in Bucharest are proof that attempts
by software companies to stop unauthorised copying are none too successful.
Microsoft tried to isolate pirate discs by giving every authentic software
CD-ROM a serial number. But check the crude sleeve notes of pirate copies and
you鈥檒l find the serial number of the original disc from which they were
copied.
Adaptec of Silicon Valley now sells a PC program called Easy CD Creator,
which makes it gloriously simple for a ROM recorder to clone music CDs. The
program even helps the user print fancy labels. And because a ROM recorder is
not crippled by SCMS, it can even copy copies.
Still, copying onto blank CDs one at a time is no way to make big profits.
Far better to find a disc-pressing plant with spare capacity鈥攁nd there is
no shortage of these. Modern 鈥渕onolines鈥� take raw plastics in at one end and pop
out finished CDs at the other, for a production cost of a few cents. The IFPI
has warned that many of the monolines in China and Eastern European states are
pressing pirate ROM and music discs. But before they can even begin to close
these plants, releasing music on CD is starting to look old hat.
It is now as easy to post a music recording on the Internet as it is to put
text on an online bulletin board. Once posted, the music can be downloaded onto
PCs anywhere in the world. Some pop groups and record companies are starting to
experiment with this way of distributing music.
Until recently, the massive bit capacity of a CD and the slow speed at which
modems receive data made this idea just an expensive novelty. But new technology
has changed all that. The MP3 audio compression system squeezes stereo music
into a bit stream that runs at 192 kilobits a second, compared with the CD
standard of 1400 kilobits a second. At the same time, modems have improved to
receive data at 56 kilobits a second. So, it now takes only around 10 minutes to
download a three-minute recording
(快猫短视频, 19 June 1999, p 32).
Fashion accessory
Better still, phone and cable TV companies are starting to offer data rates
of megabits a second using asymmetric digital subscriber loop (ADSL) services,
which work over ordinary phone lines
(快猫短视频, 15 March 1997, p 32).
And satellite services are already delivering data by dish at higher
speeds. It is suddenly becoming feasible to send compressed video signals as
well as audio.
Where are people storing all these bits? On their hard discs, of course. And
if a disc is getting full, what better way to free up space than to copy the
bits onto a recordable CD? As it happens, there are two better ways. Solid state
memory is now so cheap that it鈥檚 now a fashion accessory鈥攚itness the new
wave of Walkman-like players that store music on memory chips.
Then there鈥檚 the new DVD video system, which is designed to squeeze a
full-length movie onto a single, CD-like disc. Already there are at least four
proposals for making blank DVDs that record data, audio or video. The most
promising, DVD+RW from Philips, Sony and Hewlett Packard, is due for launch next
year. It will inevitably be used to clone music and movies.
The music and movie industries are again looking for magic fixes. Their
Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) group has just chosen a watermarking
system that will embed information, such as the name of the song, artist and
composer, within the music itself. This mark must survive repeated conversion
between the digital and analogue domains, transmission as a compressed signal
over the Net, and still trigger a 鈥渄on鈥檛 copy me鈥� circuit in a future recorder.
But this robust mark must not affect the sound of the music.
This is a very tall order and, for us pirates, the omens are looking good.
The SDMI says it used panels of 鈥済olden-eared鈥� listeners to ensure that
watermarking does not spoil the music. But the SDMI will not name the experts,
and the audio industry is starting to wonder why. Is it Copycode all over
again?
To add to the confusion, a host of other complicated anti-copying measures
are under discussion. The music industry wants to restrict the machines that
will be able to play music that has been sold over the Net. People will be able
to play their favourite tracks on their own computer or portable player, but
copying to other machines will be blocked.
The industry is also threatening to degrade recordings made from the promised
鈥渟uper hi-fi鈥� DVD-audio discs. Just as draconian, the new breed of digital video
recorders鈥攄isc or tape鈥攁re designed to restrict digital copying.
They can only take in analogue signals, which are then converted to digital code
for recording, and back again to analogue for replay. This makes Hollywood
happy鈥攁s recordings will not be perfect clones of the originals 鈥攂ut
it negates the whole point of having a digital recorder.
But all these controls may be for naught. China has now graduated into making
high-quality, low-cost DVD players, some of which are without the
copy-protection circuitry they are supposed to have. DVD recorders will be next.
Will they really come with circuitry that stops them doing what their owners
want them to do?
Even if the record, video and software industries can enforce anti-copying
measures, the message from the past is clear. Consumers will not buy new formats
that are crippled by complex copy controls. They will either stick with old
technology or feed the new formats through computers, which tend to ignore copy
controls. Though DVD-discs are encrypted to block digital copying through PCs,
the system has now been hacked.
As a pirate I have long known that there is one sure-fire way for the record,
video and software industries to put me out of business. It鈥檚 not to rely on
magic technology, but to cut prices. Most consumers would rather buy legitimate
products, so long as they cost only a little more than illicit copies. But try
telling that to a music or movie mogul and you will soon understand why piracy
is here to stay.