Earlier this week, the members of RNS were finally busted.
In 1995, the Fraunhofer Society chose “.mp3” as the extension for audio files compressed with their l3enc encoder. A couple of months later, WinPlay3 was released. These two events launched kicked off a summer of nerds trading mp3s. Yes, Virginia, some of us were downloading mp3s way back in 1995.
Of course, back then music piracy wasn’t the problem it is today — not because we weren’t trying, but mostly because the technology wasn’t there yet. For example:
– In 1995, no one had hi-speed Internet access at home, and few people had Internet access at work either. (Many college students, however, did.) The vast majority of home users accessing the Internet were doing so with slow dial-up modems.
– In 1995, hard drives were smaller. Most computer owners measured their drive space in megs, not gigs at that time.
– Because of the above two factors, most mp3s were compressed so that they would take up less disk space and take less time to transfer. Unfortunately this also meant they often sounded fairly lousy.
– CD-ROM Burners were super expensive in 1995. My friends Jeff, Johnny and I bought a 10/pack of blank CD-R disks for $100 in 1995 and used our CD-ROM burner at work to burn files. I believe the burner cost well over $1,000. I specifically remember buying a 2x CD-ROM Burner in the spring of 1996 for $499 and paying $8/disk for Verbatim CD-R discs.
– The only thing that played mp3 files were computers, and converting mp3s back to .wav files so that they could be burned to an audio CD was tedious and slow.
Put all that together and what have you got? MP3s took a long time to transfer, were mostly of poor quality, were difficult (or at least time consuming) to transfer back to audio files, and expensive to burn to CD. Piracy was not a threat.
But eventually, like always, the technology caught up. The price of CD-ROM Burners and blank CDs dropped. Burners and Internet connections got faster. And, most importantly, individuals and groups began supplying better mp3s.
RNS was one of those groups.
Suddenly, mp3s were no longer about swapping music files between online friends, like tape traders and bootleg swappers had been doing for years. As the technology increased, RNS and groups like them began providing full albums to downloaders, albums ripped at high bit rates that sounded (at least to the average listener) like the original CD. Now, with inexpensive hardware and free software, computer owners could listen to mp3s on their computer or burn them onto discs and listen to them in their cars. Houston, we have a problem.
According to the article I previously linked to, RNS’s first release was Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. Groups like RNS marked their releases with NFO files, giving details as to who had “ripped” the CD to MP3 and when. A good idea when it comes to bragging rights, but not so good when the authorities come knocking and can easily count every RNS release.
If it wasn’t bad enough that RNS was providing thousands of albums in mp3 format free to the masses, they made contacts with business insiders and began releasing rips of audio CDs before they made their way to store shelves. Called “pre-releases” or simply pre’s, the group found some unwanted attention when RNS was mentioned on MTV after the group pre-released Eminem’s album Encore. Whoops.
From 1996 to 2007, RNS released around 25,000 albums. Members of the group are facing four-years in jail and fines of $250,000 each. All things considered, that’s pretty cheap. Remember, Jammie Thomas was ordered earlier this year to pay $1.92 million for sharing 24 songs — that’s $80k per song. Should the members of RNS get a similar fine, and figuring an average of 12 songs per album, the guys are looking at fines of $24,000,000,000 (twenty four billion dollars).
Each.
The strangest thing about this whole story is that, according to all accounts, RNS quit releasing music two years ago in 2007. That’s not to imply that the statute of limitations is up or anything but … it just seems a little odd that authorities would go after them two years later. Odd, but not unheard of.
What really sucks is that these guys never made a cent off of any of their rips. They never sold anything (although prosecutors are ready to argue that they traded music for other illegal software, mostly programs and movies). Chances are they didn’t even listen to all of the albums they ripped. Again using simple math, and assuming that each album was an hour in length, 25,000 hours is three straight years worth of music. Basically, they were doing it for bragging rights.
I really shouldn’t be bummed about people I don’t personally know getting fined a quarter of a million dollars each for converting CDs to mp3s and giving them away for free on the Internet, but I kinda am.
Great post! Regarding the $24bn figure, that might still be in the works. Criminal copyright infringement and civil copyright infringement are separate. I imagine that the record industry will await the outcome of the criminal trial, or at least come close (they’ll file if they have to because of an impending statute of limitations bar), because if they are convicted criminally (“beyond a reasonable doubt”) then the same legal elements will be considered conclusively proven in a civil proceeding where the standard is a mere “preponderence of evidence.” Look for statutes of limitation to be an issue, but I fully expect the record industry to go for a record-setting civil damages judgment against these guys that will be in addition to any criminal fines assessed.
What’s criminal is the size of these fines. That amount money would never be made otherwise. And they’re not exactly deterring folks from sharing songs. Why not employ this group of guys as consultants on new media distribution instead, and let them pay back a few bucks a month that way?
What this amounts to is the lawyers making these guys into music distributors and charging them exhorbitant fees for distribution rights – after the fact. And the group never made a cent off of it. This is just another example of corporate dehumanizing, reducing the transfer of a work of art to a dollar amount. I’m sure no artist signed to a record label anywhere has EVER used Kazaa, bittorrent, or anything else to download a music file illegally. Likewise, I’m certain no recording artist would never make unlicensed copies of their own works for anyone, not even themselves. Because every recording artist is so rich that they surely pay full retail price for every piece of music media they acquire, right?
“If we can’t make the money in retail, we’ll make it in the courts” seems to be the RIAA’s mantra. Disgusting.
Shame RNS got hit after all these years. I didn’t personally know any of the group members but was on a site they affiliated with. Makes me glad I left that life behind long ago. The scene is a shadow of its former self today anyway, what with all the leech account selling going on. It was inevitable though, especially as the cost of running topsite servers went up.