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Harvard weighs in on RIAA war

Ilan Hornstein used to download his favorite tunes from the Inter-net, but he stopped several years ago, cowed by threats from the recording industry to sue high-tech music lovers who swap files.

He's still infuriated that he can't download music as he once did, and that the industry has the weight of the law behind it. An outcry by music listeners would take away the industry's clout, he said, and put music back in the public domain -- and onto his hard drive.

"Why should the law protect the record industry?" said Hornstein, who works for Raytheon Co. "It seems a lot like the Mafia."

Hornstein, 27, was among 100 scholars, industry representatives, music lovers and privacy advocates who gathered Thursday at Harvard Law School to discuss the future of digital media and online file-sharing, the bugaboo that has delighted music fans and aggravated the music industry.

"There was a time that to make a copy, you needed a monk, and a desk, and months," said Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, the faculty co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center, a sponsor of the gathering.

"And then Shawn Fanning hit the scene," he said, referring to the college dropout who created the wildly popular music-trading Web site Napster, which was shut down in 2001 after battling the music industry over copyright infringement.

The speed of digital media technology, which can put a pirated movie onto the Internet in hours, pirated CDs and DVDs on street corners around the world in days, and allows home computer users to swap music using "peer-to-peer" file-sharing software, is fundamentally changing the entertainment industry.

"Clearly, we need a solution to the issue. Everyone would agree to that," said Richard Conlon, vice president of BMI, an organization that collects license fees for 300,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers whose tunes are played in public.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been on the offensive against song swappers. Last week the RIAA sued 261 people, including a 12-year-old girl, in federal court for allegedly distributing on average more than 1,000 copyrighted music files each.

But several participants at the Harvard meeting said they doubted that tactic would stop the millions of people using file sharing to download music.

Thursday's discussion sparked strong reactions and outbursts of dismay from some participants, particularly to one proposal that the government treat the music industry like a public utility, and regulate it as such.

"Are you seriously considering the regulation of artists?" asked John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist and a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That is so Orwellian. I'm astonished this is even on the screen."

Ivan Reidel, a student at Harvard Law School, said he's studying ways to get rid of licensing organizations like BMI and ASCAP altogether, and instead create an organization of artists who would opt out of the licensing system and deal directly with consumers.

Asked the odds of such a scenario coming to fruition, he said with a smile: "I'm working on that."
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