Very advanced
Some memories of the good old days of music sharing. College kids were all over it. And they even downloaded some Deniece Williams to their 11-gigabyte hard drives. From the archives of the SeattleP-I:
The John Belushi poster and Old Milwaukee sign aside, Mike Schierberl’s cramped frat room is a storehouse of technology, the centerpiece a Pentium II 400 loaded with 128 megs of ram and an 11-gigabyte hard drive.
“It’s real big,” Schierberl says. “But half of it’s music right now.”
Schierberl, a junior at the University of Washington, has crammed his computer with 1,435 CD-quality music files downloaded from the Internet using a compression technology known as MP3.
To techno-literate fans like Schierberl, MP3 has made the World Wide Web a candy store of tens of thousands of free songs. To the big record labels, the technology is an open invitation to pirate music that’s protected by a copyright and that listeners rightfully should pay for.
The Recording Industry Association of America has launched an assault on the free flow of copyrighted music over the Internet, but it faces a tough battle – particularly on college campuses, where dorms are wired to the Internet through connections much faster than a T-1 line.
At a place like the UW, students can create a 100-title music library in an hour, drawing from hundreds of sites that often offer MP3 files of popular – and protected – songs.
Using the most popular software, Winamp, it’s simple to create custom CDs for parties or roommates. And the files are so compressed that a standard CD will hold 200 songs.
The “wow, cool” factor is high enough that many students shrug off the niceties of copyright law.
The UW has no way to estimate how much the university’s Internet capacity is used to download MP3 files. But ask a typical student.
“Everyone who has a computer here at the UW at least knows about it and probably has downloaded a bunch,” said Kirk Lennstrom, a UW sophomore who lives in one of the university’s most massive dorms, McMahon Hall. “I mean, I got into this late.”
Three weeks ago, Lennstrom’s guitar teacher asked him to practice a Blues Traveler song, “Hook.” Rather than buy the CD or find someone to make him a copy, Lennstrom logged onto the Internet and found it within minutes. He has since loaded 97 songs into his music library.
Most of the songs are classic rock, some are pop tunes from the ’80’s that have great nostalgia value but that Lennstrom would never go out and buy, such as “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” by Deniece Williams.
