《How Music Got Free》读后感1000字

《How Music Got Free》是一本由Stephen Witt著作，Viking出版的Hardcover图书，本书定价：USD 27.95，页数：304，特精心收集的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。

《How Music Got Free》读后感(一)：版权这个概念就要成为历史了

一个十年磨一剑打造mp3音频格式的德国工程师，一个把数千张音乐CD上传到网络的工厂流水线工人，一个曾在三大唱片厂商任职的音乐产业的教父，他们的生活会有怎样的交集？作者交叉了三个人的故事，讲述世纪之交数字格式和互联网给音乐行业带来的巨变，也把「盗版是否是非正义的」这个问题扔到了读者面前。

一方面，版权的保护的确维护了音乐人和唱片公司的权益，推动艺术家们创作更丰富、更优质的作品；但另一方面，数字格式的流行加上网络的无障碍传播已经使得版权保护变得不可能，盗版者其实只是「顺应历史的潮流」而已。

到底谁是谁非？也许未来才有公论。

《How Music Got Free》读后感(二)：亚文化、法律、技术与一部音乐盗版史

亚文化、法律、技术与一部音乐盗版史

——How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy, Stephen Witt, Viking, 2015

"审判长问张克东：你是搞技术的是吧？从你了解来讲，画面拦截能不能达到？

张克东：没有这种技术手段。"

这是上个月引发全民关注的快播案中的“精彩语录”的一段，审判长在想象是否存在一只大手可以随时掐掉用户手机上的某些画面。这一段对话在很多搞技术的人眼里被视为法律人不懂技术。

在这个每天都有大量热点炒作的时代，即便是只过了一个月，也好像在提起一件大半年前的事，或许有人还能记得几句庭审时的精彩语录，但是再谈论起谁是谁非仿佛变得十分过时可笑。

直到读到《How music got free》这本书。

这是一本记录美国21世纪之交音乐盗版历史的纪实性的文学作品，大约十年前，在书中竟然有一段类似的询问：

（注：Makepeace 是公诉人，也就是常说的检察官。Ellis 则是一个盗版网站的负责人。）

"Makepeace：Whereabouts were they based？

Ellis: I think they were in Canada. I don’t know where.

Makepeace: A place called Linux？

Ellis: I don’t know."

在询问一个盗版组织时，当时的公诉人 Peter Makepeace 竟然认为 Linux 是在加拿大的一个地名，而实际上 Linux 是这个盗版组织的网站服务器的操作系统名字，这在 IT 行业应该是一个常识。

历史是如此惊人的相似，技术界与法律界的隔阂至今仍未改变。

这本纪实性的作品巧妙地选取了三条线索串起了世纪初美国的音乐盗版历史：里面有MP3格式的发明人，有唱片工厂的装配工人，也有大的音乐公司的CEO。大量的细节展示，总给人一种似曾相识的感觉，而作者叙述平实，却又让时时刻刻让人思考关于技术、法律和亚文化三者之间的冲突。

一、一只叫MP3的“黑天鹅”

该书的开篇会让人看得费解，作者不说音乐却从 MP3 格式遭遇挫折开始入手。而如果耐心读下去你会发现这才是音乐盗版历史的真正源头。

MP3 是一种音乐的压缩方式，他利用了人耳某些错觉，将音乐压缩，使得解码之后能够产生与播放唱片相同的听觉效果。然而这种在今天占绝对主流的格式最初并不顺利，在经过一个叫国际格式通用委员会的专家评议后，当时的胜出者是 MP2.

可惜造化弄人，曾经风光一时的 MP2 并没有因为国际格式通用委员会的“钦定”而流传下去，相反 MP3 却成为了一只“黑天鹅”。MP3 的火爆原因却正是因为当时盗版音乐的那群人利用MP3格式对音乐进行压制。盗版流传的速度太快以至于 MP3 格式成为了搭便车者，音乐盗版的历史大幕至此正式展开。

二、法律的尴尬：当法律面对亚文化

最初的音乐可能更像是发烧友们的聚会，通过当时的即时通讯工具 IRC 进行简单的文件交流。而随着更多的人参与进来，音乐文件传输工具也进行了数次迭代。从一对一的文件传输，到最后极客们发明出了大规模在线同时多人互传的技术（也就是现在熟悉的所谓“种子”），支撑着这个庞大的产业背后逐渐形成了一种“盗版”亚文化。

规模的庞大也迅速增加了关注度，大的唱片公司开始做出行动，而政府也不容忍法外之地。然而无论是著作权的协会、公司甚至是 FBI 在初期都感到一种莫名的无力感。

此时此刻法律面对已然形成的“盗版”亚文化显得十分尴尬，在三大方面的冲突下都以落败结局：

• 价值观冲突：盗版的一代

第一个层次是价值观的冲突，在这些互联网成长起来的年轻人天生就认为听音乐就该这样，完全没有买唱片的习惯。

• 身份冲突：粉丝和盗版用户

第二个层次是身份上的冲突，书中提到的一个细节很有意思：有时候歌星也感到为难，一方面这些人是粉丝，另一方面则又是盗版用户，最终在打击这些用户时，歌星却必须选择为他们撑腰。

• 解决方案冲突：究竟该拿谁开刀

第三个层次是解决方案的冲突，由于最终形成的种子技术，使得实际上是所有人传给所有人，这让每一个人都是盗版的一环，那究竟该拿谁开刀呢？实际的做法很不理想。文中大量列举了一些普通人被法庭传讯的例子。

三、技术中立是不错，但这是一句废话

然而这把刀最后还是落到了网站的创建者头上，这才有了文章开头的对话，只是这把刀太钝。当时的检察官没有做足功课，使得这名建立了一个比 iTunes 更全的音乐网站的站长无罪释放。用作者的话来说就是：

"When the jury retired on January 15,2010, it took them less than two hours to reach the 'not guilty' verdict."

2个小时，这看似是技术中立的胜利，但实际上确是一场糟糕的较量。可能双方都还可以做的更多，或许是成立党派（Pirate Bay 确实这样做了）。

法律界的人需要去多了解一些什么是 Linux，Torrents 怎么运作。极客们也需要去了解什么是通谋，什么是共犯。对于前者而言，能够将技术手段和自己熟悉的法律规范犯罪要件对应起来；对于后者而言，则能够更加清楚自己的每一个动作相应有何后果，而不至于像书中最后一章描述的那样，自己身陷囹圄而幕后老板逃之夭夭。

《How Music Got Free》读后感(三)：笔记

-- MP3 the Format

The audio compression method was originally developed for streaming, not for storing media content. The development team at Germany-based Fraunhofer, led by Karlheinz Brandenburg, was supported by state funding and corporate sponsors (Thomson and AT&T).

In 1991, Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) endorsed three digital audio compression methods including MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3).

MP2, one of the three and inferior to MP3 in terms of technology, was of MUSICAM which was a “proxy” for Philips. Philips had been making money in licensing from the compact disc. (Also, Fraunhofer was forced to license the patent on the filter bank developed by MUSICAM.) "Standardization committees chose the mp2 for digital FM radio, for interactive CD-ROMs, for Video Compact Disc (the predecessor to the DVD), for Digital Audio Tape, and for the soundtrack to over-the-air HDTV broadcasting. They chose the mp3 for nothing.” Later in1995 Philips-backed mp2 was chosen as the standard for the audio track for the home DVD player and then for airwaves.

-- MP3 Adoption and Monetization

“...history showed that, from the AC/ DC 'Current Wars' of the late nineteenth century to the VHS-Betamax battle of the 1980s, victory didn’t necessarily go to the best, but to the most vicious. From Edison to Sony, the spoils were won by those who not only promoted their own standard, but who cleverly undermined the competition.” But mp3 is a different story.

Mp3 team member Bernhard Grill wrote a PC application, the 'Level 3 encoder,'or ‘L3Enc’ for short, for encoding and playing back mp3 files in circa 1995. “The program fit on a single 3.5-inch floppy disk."

"Introduced in late 1993, Intel’s powerful new Pentium chips were the first processors capable of playing back an mp3 without stalling. Plus, the new generation of hard drives was enormous: with storage capacity of nearly a gigabyte, they could store almost 200 songs. The biggest limitation was still the encoding process. Due to MPEG’s forced inclusion of the cumbersome MUSICAM filter bank, even a top-of-the-line Pentium processor would take about six hours to rip an album from a compact disc."..."Brandenburg made an executive decision: to promote the mp3 standard, Fraunhofer would simply give L3Enc away. Thousands of floppy disks were made, and these were distributed at trade shows through late 1994 and early 1995."

WinPlay3, an mp3 player Grill later developed for Windows 95 that could play 20 songs, charged for a registration key at launch (It would be self-destructed after 20 uses. Later it would get cracked and serial numbers stolen from Fraunhofer’s FTP servers.). But nobody purchased it. The team realized that the problem was there weren’t many mp3 files for users to download and the main cause of that was that the mp3 encoders were not widely available.

The price for the encoding license would be lowered from $125 to $12.5 and then to $5. A website offering free downloads of L3Enc mp3 encoders for DOS, Windows, and Linux was launched in 1995 (The encoder developer didn’t think building one for Macintosh "was worth his time."). Fraunhofer wrote an accompanying text file encouraging users who liked it to send 85 deutsche marks to them. "Over its lifetime, the downloadable L3Enc demo earned less than 500 dollars."

In April 1997, "Justin Frankel, a freshman student at the University of Utah, debuted Winamp, an mp3 player that offered several minor cosmetic improvements to WinPlay3, chiefly the ability to edit playlists. Frankel did not bother to license the technology from Fraunhofer ... Within a year, Winamp had been downloaded 15 million times. Around that time too, several different companies debuted officially licensed mp3 encoders that improved on L3Enc.” Frankel’s Nullsoft would be acquired by AOL in 1999.

"Diamond Multimedia and Saehan International, both Korean companies, independently approached Fraunhofer with the idea of making the world’s first portable mp3 player. (They were unaware that Harald Popp had commissioned a functioning prototype two years before.)” "In May 1998, Saehan’s MPMan arrived. The first consumer-grade mp3 player was a box-sized contraption with a tiny monochrome screen that cost $ 600 and held five songs.” It sold poorly.

"Napster’s servers went offline in July 2001, and, following a mad rush of eleventh-hour downloading, the public had hundreds of millions of mp3 files stranded on their home computers, and no easy way to get them off."

Although there’s no money in the consumer market but the mp3 development team and its backers have made a fortune from the professional market.

The team made its first sale of a hand-built decoder to a radio station in 1988. Their "first — and for some time, only- enterprise scale customer" was Telco Systems whose biggest customer was the National Hockey League. "The NHL was the perfect customer: the mp3 had been specifically calibrated to the sound of the game.” It saved a lot of money for the NHL and finally generated income for Fraunhofer.

The success of Telco Systems’ in US digital sports broadcasting market “revived interest” in mp3. Linde (a sales manager assigned by Thomson) signed deals with dot-coms, software vendors, chip manufacturers, game designers, car stereo vendors, and hundreds of start-up ventures. In the first four years he’d worked as licensing manager he’d signed less than twenty deals. In the next four he signed more than 600.”

"Macromedia licensed the mp3 for use with its multimedia Flash codec; Microsoft licensed it for an early version of Windows Media Player; a start-up satellite radio provider named WorldSpace licensed it for broadcasting to the Southern Hemisphere."

"Fraunhofer was pulling in more than 100 million dollars annually in licensing money, and would continue to do so for the next ten years. Brandenburg would never reveal his exact stake…”

Karlheinz Brandenburg "earned a far, far larger share of the mp3’s licensing revenue than anybody else. Of all the names hat appeared on the patents, Brandenburg’s appeared most often, and, on the first and most important one, filed in 1986, Brandenburg’s name appeared alone.”..

“...the mp3 format would have been phased out in 1996, and the superior AAC format would have taken its place. But Brandenburg was careful not to let this happen. Instead, he split the marketplace, directing AAC toward industrial applications like cell phones and high-definition TV, while pushing the mp3 to home consumers for use with their music”…”though he earned money from both standards, his stake in the mp3 earnings was greater."

Since Spotify adopted Ogg, an open-source format, over mp3, “the technology was free now. It was the music that cost money."

-- Content Sources

Employees at CD manufacturing plant, radio station DJs, and average users. A major problem online digital content platforms like RNS caused the music industry was leaked albums could be available the same day they were officially released or many weeks ahead of their release dates. And the internet ables users to get them within hours.

"The first industrial-scale mp3 pirate was a Scene player by the screen name 'NetFraCk' in 1996. "Using Fraunhofer’s L3Enc encoder, NetFraCk had started a new crew, the world’s first ever digital music piracy group: Compress 'Da Audio, or CDA for short."

From 1996 to 2007, the music Scene on RNS accumulated a total of 20,000 leaks. "From 2000 onward Glover (from Kings Mountain plant, which would be acquired by Universal from PolyGram) was the world’s leading leaker of prerelease music.” By 2006 he had leaked 2000 discs.

Making money from the leaked content was strictly forbidden on the Scene. But Glover was making money from pirated content sales and one of his motivations to contribute to the Scene was that top leakers like him could be able to access other categories, videos, games and software.

-- On Piracy

"Drafted during a severe sales slump in 1982, Greenspan’s paper had taken an independent look at the industry. His analysis blamed tape bootlegging for declining revenues, then considered various pricing strategies the industry might employ to counteract this trend. But, using advanced econometric techniques, he found that neither raising nor lowering album prices was likely to work. Instead, Greenspan figured, the only way to reverse the sales slump was through an aggressive campaign of law enforcement against the bootleggers. In other words, the success of capitalism required vigorous intervention from the state."

"You didn’t solve the problem of piracy by calling the cops. You solved it by putting out Thriller. In Morris’ view, it was Michael Jackson’s 1982 blockbuster that had really rescued the slumping industry— what had been missing wasn’t law enforcement but simply hits.””(Doug) Morris believed consumers would continue to buy legitimate discs, just as long as he kept cranking out hits."

Circa 1997 Brandenburg visited RIAA to sell the idea of "the copy-protectable mp3”. But he was informed that “the music industry did not believe in electronic music distribution.” RIAA would later explain why they turned him down: 1) they thought Brandenburg was self-serving, 2) RIAA didn’t have the authority to make large-scale investments in digital distribution technology, and 3) their technical people, who loathe mp3 quality, told them not to refer Brandenburg to a major label.

“Rosen (CEO of RIAA) and her anti-piracy team had regular conversations with the Department of Justice, trying to convince them to go after the more brazen profiteers like mp3. com and Napster. This proved difficult. The music industry, was not well liked on Capitol Hill.”(e.g. Unlike the movie industry, the music industry refused to institute a self-regulatory rating system.)

Major labels sued Korean device maker Diamond, whose Rio player sold poorly; 18 record companies including Universal led by RIAA sued Napster. Diamond won the case while Napster lost.

Universal, joined by BMG, EMI, and Sony, would begin to sue file-sharers. Warner and many smaller labels and the head of RIAA objected. "...by the end of 2005 the RIAA had brought educational lawsuits against 16,837 people. Almost all of the defendants were average citizens with no connection to elite pirates like RNS or Oink.” "The vast majority of the accused had settled. A small number of cases had been dropped, but only one— out of almost 17,000— had been brought to a jury trial. On October 4, 2007, Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minnesota, was found liable for infringing the copyrights on 24 songs she had downloaded off Kazaa. The jury ruled that she owed the recording industry $ 9,250 a song—a total of $ 222,000. (Thomas appealed the ruling.)"

"The Justice Department’s statement of facts in (the leading leaker) Glover’s case made reference to the scope of the conspiracy. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Prabhu explained his position that RNS was a criminal organization, one that operated for the benefit of its members. He explained how the topsite economy provided members with in-kind benefits for sustained and deliberate copyright infringement— an arrangement that provided material rewards for breaking the law."

— New Attitudes toward Copyright

"In early 2006 a new political party had formed in Sweden: the Pirate Party. Not aligned along the traditional left–right axis, its platform called for a rollback of copyright laws and total amnesty for Internet file-sharers. The Pirates had seen how, when it came to the Internet, the concept of scarcity didn’t exist, and a university student like Ellis could create the world’s greatest music archive from his bedroom. The only recourse for copyright holders, therefore, was to re-create those conditions of scarcity by artificially limiting the supply. And, as Alan Greenspan had observed so many years earlier, such conditions could be secured only by pressure from the state."

"The two Pirate parliamentarians (with seats at the table of the EU), lonely though they were, sought to reverse this, pushing to reduce the length of copyright to just five years and to eliminate all patents on software and biotechnology."

"Both Brandenburg and Grill knew that, without the incentives of software patent revenue on the horizon, they never would have spent the better part of a decade conducting those listening tests”…"And that was their ultimate rebuke to the Pirates: without patent protection on software, the mp3 would never have existed."

-- The Conventional Music Industry in the U.S.

In 1990 CD sales started to outpace vinyl.

In the late 1990s, Americans were spending more money on recorded music than ever before and the recording industry were enjoying the most profitable years.

The per-unit cost of a CD was was brought below a dollar while an album was charged $16.98 retail. The biggest labels worked together to convince large retailers "to refrain from selling discs at a discount, in exchange for access to pooled advertising funds. Deals of this sort violated federal antitrust law…"

"Even as digital piracy spread from college dormitories to the public at large, 2000 was still a banner year for the industry. Customers bought more music that year than ever before or since…""Nevertheless, the Napster boom coincided with the two best years the recording industry ever saw, and even Morris would later concede that, for a while, Napster’s pirate trade in mp3s fueled the CD boom.”The major reason was portable music players didn’t prevail then.

“Despite the impressive growth in its market share, it was all Universal could do to keep its sales numbers flat. Everywhere else there was carnage. Tower Records was hurtling toward bankruptcy. Sony’s Columbia imprint was still fighting a civil war against its own consumer electronics division. EMI was buried in debt. Bertelsmann was offering its music assets up for sale."

“By the end of 2007 compact disc sales had fallen by 50 percent from their 2000 peak, and that was with aggressive price discounting. Digital sales of legal mp3s didn’t begin to make up the difference.” In 2010 "the music industry bottomed out at less than half its 2000 size.”

"Of course, the easiest way to prevent leaks would have been to get rid of the CD entirely. But even in 2013, after 17 years of psychoacoustic chaos, the industry could not afford to do so— more than a third of the U.S. music industry’s revenues still came from physical album sales, and more than half globally."

"As she (RIAA’s CEO Hilary Rosen) publicly denounced the service (Napster), she privately pushed for Napster and the major labels to cut a deal." "In late 2000 Middelhoff announced that Bertelsmann would enter a joint venture with Napster to develop paid, legal channels using peer-to-peer tech."

Universal and Sony established a JV to develop Pressplay, an online music store with complicated licensing structure and limited selection. It turned out to be a money-losing deal.

“He (Steve Jobs) didn’t think the labels had to invest so much money in risky music ventures, and he believed the artists wanted a greater stake in the overall pie. His proposed iTunes music label would offer artists nothing—no advance—in exchange for a royalty split of 50 percent that would start paying out from the first day. The economics would be transparent, and totally fair, and no one would be asked to subsidize anyone else.”The store (iTunes) sold over 70 million songs in the first year. But it only contributed 1% of Universal’s total revenue in 2005. Early leaks hurt iTunes sales too. However, the existing mp3 files users had helped iPod sales.

"In response to these shifts (in revenue structures), music executives began pushing artists to sign “360” deals that guaranteed labels not just a portion of album sales but live music and publishing rights as well."

"As artists and labels sought new directions for revenue, the importance of viral videos, publishing rights, streaming services, and the festival touring circuit continued to grow. In 2011, for the first time since the invention of the phonograph, Americans spent more money on live music than recorded. In 2012, North American sales of digital music surpassed sales of the compact disc. In 2013, revenues from subｓｃｒｉｐｔion and advertiser-supported streaming passed $ 1 billion for the first time."

"But streaming didn’t solve everything. It may not have solved anything. The music streaming platforms were perpetual money-losers, spending unsustainable amounts to license content to attract early users. Despite this spending, artists with millions of plays earned royalty checks only in the hundreds of dollars. In 2013, amid an upbeat economic picture, the recording industry’s total revenues once again declined, to their lowest level in three decades. Consumer research showed that new Spotify subscribers stopped pirating more or less completely. They also stopped buying albums. The labels were now engaged in a difficult two-front war, with the streaming services on one side and the pirates on the other."

Doug Morris: former boss of Warner Music and Universal, and current CEO of Sony Music. After the PolyGram merger, Universal became the largest music company in the world with more than 25% a market share (via Wikipedia). In 1999 when Napster was released, Morris was "the most powerful record exec in history”. After Universal was sold to Vivendi, Morris would be “the best-paid man in music” for the following decade from 2001. (His contract with Vivendi assesses his performance not against his top-line revenue, but his overall return on invested capital.) “...in ten years of declining revenues and massive layoffs and economic upheaval, not once had Universal ever had a losing year.”

"Since 2002, he (Steve Jobs) had been calling Morris incessantly, trying to get him to sign off on his new iTunes Store idea,..” Universal signed on to iTunes in early 2003 and the store went live in late April. Steve Jobs always wanted Morris to join iTunes.

Inspired by the fact that his grandson got music by watching music videos on YouTube who makes revenues through advertising, Morris required video sites to gave Universal “a significant portion of the advertising revenue stream” and came up with Vevo, a music video site launched in 2009 that takes advantage of Universal’s video assets (more than 45,000 videos) which were previously made for promoting albums and gave them away. "Vevo took over thirty years of creative output from more than 10,000 artists that had been written off as promotional cost and transformed it into a high-growth profit center."

-- Napster

Launched in June 1999, the peer-to-peer file sharing client had had “almost twenty million users” by early 2000. It peaked at sixty million users. Its servers went offline in July 2001.

"Napster was a natural monopoly whose selection and speed only improved as more people joined.""In essence, the song could be streamed. Napster wasn’t just a file-sharing service; it was the infinite digital jukebox. And it was free."

-- Oink’s Pink Palace

On May 30, 2004, Oink’s Pink Palace, went live — "an exclusive music tracker, long on quality and short on quantity.” It would become a new major source of leaked music.

-- The Culture of Digital Piracy

It’s about being “among the ‘elite”.

"They were pirates, sure, but what they really wanted was order."

"One of the busiest threads on the site (Oink’s) simply asked 'Why Do You Pirate Music？' Thousands of different answers came in. Oinkers talked of cost, contempt for major labels, the birth of a new kind of community, courageous political activism, and sometimes simply greed."

"When the music Scene had gotten its start in 1996, most of the participants were teenagers. Now those same pioneers were approaching 30, and the glamour was fading. Plus, the leakers tended to decline in value as they grew older. They outgrew their jobs at college radio stations or found more lucrative careers than music journalism. They gained a better appreciation of the legal risks, or accumulated undesirable baggage like social lives or scruples."

"...there was a new generation of kids who had never paid for a CD, who viewed file-sharing as their prerogative, and who saw spending money on music as an antique form of patronage."

"The torrenters organized themselves into complex groups with well-defined hierarchies. They hid their identities behind pseudonyms and facilitated the distribution of online contraband. They understood that what they were doing was illegal, and did it anyway, with no obvious benefits to themselves. To law enforcement that made them criminals, but to a growing number of people they were starting to look like political dissidents."

-- Competitors to MP3 and Others

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which was 30% faster than mp3, was developed by the mp3 team and completed in 1996. Brandenburg gave Sony, AT&T and Dolby large shares, hoping them to fight as hard for AAC as Philips was fighting for the mp2. Steve Jobs "wanted everyone to use AAC. In discussions, he correctly made the point that AAC was a second-generation technology…” iTunes uses AAC.

"Ogg Vorbis, arrived late to a crowded marketplace, but it had some distinct advantages. Ogg was an open-source project, meaning that anyone could implement it and pay no royalties. It also scored better on listening tests than any other format.” Spotify uses Ogg.

"Microsoft had been developing its own psychoacoustic coding standard at its research campus in Redmond. In August 1999 it introduced Windows Media Audio…”It was late that “mp3 had become the Internet’s most-searched-for word..."