Carl Clegg is a senior at Brigham Young University, studying Spanish and philosophy.
Digital audio has made brisk strides during the past decade. Compact disc (CD) technology, in particular, has gained a large share of the American music market. But the wave of the future may very well be digital audio tape (DAT).
DAT has a lot to offer. Already standardized, DAT recorders are sold in Japan, and on a limited basis, in Europe. The DAT cassette—about half the size of a conventional analog cassette—can store two hours of CD-quality music. Similar arrangements of digitally stored bits and bytes account for the ultra-high fidelity of both DAT and CD formats. The principal advantage of the DAT recorder over the CD player, however, is recordability. This very asset, in fact, is responsible for the current ban in the United States on DAT technology.
The impetus behind the DAT embargo is an effort to appease the prerecorded-music industry. Their chief concern is that bootlegging will cut into their profits. While their concern is legitimate, their solution is not.
The record industry is advocating laws which would coerce DAT manufacturers into equipping each DAT recorder with a copy-code chip. These chips would inhibit the recording of specially encoded CDs or, for that matter, any encoded medium, including prerecorded DAT cassettes.
Record-company executives contend that DAT would be an open invitation to piracy—a violation of musicians’ property rights. In reality, however, the copy-code chip would violate consumers’ rights to make copies for personal use.
The same laws which prohibit unauthorized reproduction of published material also prohibit bootlegging of prerecorded music. The “fair use” clause of the Federal copyright law permits reproduction of copyrighted works for educational and noncommercial purposes. Likewise, the law permits consumers to duplicate prerecorded music for personal use only.
It seems reasonable that if someone buys an LP or CD, he should have the right to make a tape copy to play back on his Walkman, in his car, or, for that matter, on his DATman. Here, the law agrees. There is, therefore, a glaring contradiction: on one hand, the consumer has the right to make home copies for personal use; on the other hand, the proposed copy-code law would prevent him from exercising that right.
The copy-code argument is fallacious for another reason: the law would be unenforceable. Historically, technophiles have responded to any mechanical device that annoys them. (This, of course, is not to say that what they do is always legal or moral.) Their answer to the radar trap was the radar dectector; their answer to scrambled video signals is the descrambler; their answer to the copy-code chip would come soon after the enactment of the copy-code law. Any law, such as the copy-code law, which is widely viewed as unfair and is easily circumvented, breeds disrespect for all law.
Just as Prohibition moved liquor businesses underground, the current DAT embargo has created a plethora of unauthorized “dealers.” If one has the right connections and is willing to deal with a back-alley swindler, it is possible to buy a DAT recorder in the United States.
Proponents of the copy-code law claim they are defending the property rights of musicians. It seems clear, however, that record labels are more concerned with their own sales than with the rights of artists. In fact, the implications of the copy-code proposal actually offend the artist because encoded music suffers sonic degradation. The artist’s music never reaches the consumer’s ear in a pure form.
The high resolution of the CD offers the closest replication of “live” music. Critical listeners, however, who have performed comparison tests between coded and uncoded music, claim that the encoding is annoyingly obvious and seriously detracts from the quality of prerecorded music. A Gallup poll showed that even the untrained ear can detect encoded music. Since all prerecorded music (and presumably, radio broadcasts, too) would be encoded, virtually everyone would suffer, not just the DAT owners.
Consumers as Criminals
One of the most offensive inferences of the copy-code proposal is the presumption that all potential DAT consumers are criminals. Those most offended, of course, are home-recording buffs—those who enjoy recording not prerecorded music, but their own creations. Under the copy-code law, anyone wishing to purchase a DAT recorder would be forced to buy a copy-code chip—an accessory he probably doesn’t want and shouldn’t be forced to buy.
Perhaps record company executives should take a retrospective look at the conventional analog cassette. When it first became popular, the cassette was feared by record companies as a means for copy-pirates to poach music from LPs. Today, prerecorded tape sales—especially with the advent of the Walkman—ex- ceed the sales of LPs and CDs combined. Since a prerecorded DAT tape would sound at least as good as a CD, record companies may be working against themselves by crippling a future market.
One way to deal with the problem of DAT piracy might be a stiff penalty for criminal trafficking of pirated tapes. We also should look to the free market to generate its own solutions. The personal computer industry, for example, has done amazingly well without the “help” of anti-copying chips (which, a few years back, were thought to be essential). Software companies, in an effort to discourage unauthorized copying, reward paying customers by offering manuals, furore revisions, and in many cases, telephone trouble-shooting, at little or no extra cost.
Record companies need to show more initiative. One record company, for example, has addressed the dilemma of multiple formats by offering a cassette copy with the purchase of each CD. Far-sighted companies will spend more resources on producing prerecorded DAT tapes, instead of trying to ban and devitalize DAT. Consumers would have no need to copy CDs if their favorite music were available on DAT. The best approach to progress is not to resist it, but to adapt to it. []
Ideas On Liberty
John Stuart Mill
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
