Introduction

Please note - these reviews are from 2001. It was a lot of work, and an extensive review in a time of fast development. We keep them online because the comments and principles are pretty much same as it ever was.

There has been considerable recent press about music and the MP3 file, much of it loud and shrill. The corporate music industry would like to take MP3 out back and shoot it. So why the bad rap if MP3 is just a file format? Because the processes of recording CD's to your hard drive (ripping) and making your own MP3s (encoding) are simple and straightforward, enabling copying and usage outside the control of the copyright holders, and avoiding paying for access to the music. Thus, MP3s are not illegal, but their use can be. Acquiring and spreading MP3's on the internet becomes easier as the speed of information transfer (bandwidth) increases.

These factors encouraged applications like Napster, through whose site you could acquire and make available MP3 files whether or not you owned such ‘intellectual property’. The next step has been FreeServe and Gnutella, far harder to locate and close down than Napster, since they do not have a central directory of music files. The boldest copyright infringement, blocked in the courts even faster than Napster, was MP3.com’s My.MP3 scheme where files were encoded by them, held on their server computer. They were made accessible if the user inserted the original, uniquely identifiable CD in the computer while connecting to the site. What people did with the MP3 after that, they said, wasn’t their responsibility.

It wasn't always. A long time ago in a land far away....