By SCOTT DEWING
Published: February 2003

MY LIFE OF CRIME BEGAN EARLY at age 8 when I pirated my first music: a homemade recording to cassette tape of an 8-track of Supertramp: Live in Paris. For those of you who are too young and lucky enough to not know what an 8-track is, let me explain. It was a magnetic tape recording-medium invented in the 1960s that became a mass market success during the 1970s. It came in a plastic cartridge about the size of a quick-read paperback novel. Unlike clunky reel-to-reel tapes, you could just push a button on your 8-track player and it would go to the song you wanted. 8-tracks were like analog CDs. They were much more portable than vinyl records and didn’t take up nearly the floor space.

This was all very revolutionary and exciting for the 70s, a decade that would otherwise have expired as a historical yawn compared to the upheaval of the 60s if it hadn’t been for the genius of 8-tracks and the scandal of Watergate.

8-tracks were eventually replaced by their even smaller counterparts, cassette tapes. Ironically, cassette tapes, although smaller, were arguably not better than 8-tracks. You couldn’t just push a button and queue up to the song you wanted. Life became enslaved to fast-forward and rewind buttons, rolling counters, guess work and waiting for your favorite song.

Besides being small, cassette tapes had another very appealing feature: you could record on them, which leads back to the scene of my first crime. My friend’s father had rigged up a recording station down in his basement where you could record and reproduce 8-tracks and vinyl records to cassette tape.

Technically, this was illegal. It violated all kinds of copyright law and you were stealing from the artist and from the recording industry that made a living on those artists. During the 70s, music piracy became trendy, fell into the category of “everyone else is doing it” and became a socially acceptable crime like jaywalking, stealing hotel towels and smoking marijuana. No longer did you have to go buy all the albums you wanted. You bought some but then swapped with your friends and added to your illicit library of recordings.

All of this, of course, sparked a legal debate, one that would pit artists and recording labels against consumers as well as artists against recording labels, which was usually already a bad relationship to begin with. All of this would contribute to another national trend that was picking up speed and momentum during the 70s: litigation.

Fast forward some 30 years. 8-tracks are long gone. Some have joined their recording-medium predecessors (vinyl, wax-cylinder, reel-to-reel) in the Smithsonian while others remain preserved by a few eccentric collectors who dig everything retro. I imagine most are buried in our landfills, while others remain hidden in basements and forgotten attics.

Cassettes are in the twilight of their life and will soon be gone too. For now, however, they are sustained by people like me who are too cheap or too poor to replace the tape deck in their car with a CD player. We opt for recordings, for the crime of copying digital bits from CDs to cheap analog cassette tapes. But that’s not a real threat anymore.

The real threat is the increasing ease and speed of moving digital bits. As is its trademark, the Internet has made time, space and geography moot factors. No longer are we limited to swapping physical objects (like vinyl records) with neighborhood friends. We now have the ability to swap music files with anyone anywhere in the world at any time using what is called peer-to-peer networking (or P2P). Let me repeat that: anyone, anywhere in the world, any time. This is heavy and powerful stuff.

Artists too can now distribute their music directly to consumers. Both of these recent developments are very bad for the recording industry and have them running around like a bunch of 8-track dinosaurs seeking to escape their own extinction.

In public they rant about the rights of artists, protection of intellectual property, the need for public education about the illegality of unauthorized file-sharing, and so on. But if you could get them to sit down with you, say in a bar where you could lube up their tongues with a few stiff drinks, they’d probably admit that they are afraid—afraid that all this P2P stuff, CD burners, MP3 players and the Internet is going to squeeze them out of a job. They’d tell you they’re afraid because there’s ample historical evidence that technology has a way of doing that. Perhaps if you got a few more drinks in them, they would tell you that they’re worried about artists being able to sell directly to their fans, to the almighty consumers. They’d tell you that they’re worried that ultimately technology—and especially the Internet—has the potential to get rid of the middle-man, which is what they are.

I don’t blame them. No one likes to feel expendable and vulnerable like that. And yet, we are all crowding for seats in this same boat.

In September, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, Hilary Rosen, testified at a congressional hearing on music piracy and peer-to-peer networks, saying public education about the illegality of unauthorized file-sharing was of the utmost importance.

“I wish I could tell you that there is a silver bullet that could resolve this very serious problem,” Rosen said. “But there isn’t.”

I have no silver bullet either. Neither do the courts. There will be ongoing litigation and they will struggle to apply old laws in a rapidly changing technology landscape. And while I respect the intellectual property rights of musicians (as well as all artists) and wish for folks like Hilary Rosen to remain gainfully employed, I know I’m not alone in facing the music that music piracy is not going to abruptly come to an end.

Meanwhile, I listen to my hard-earned and illicit copy of Supertramp: Live in Paris while driving my car and can’t help but wonder if the world would be a simpler place if we could just go back to 8-tracks and cassette tapes.