MEIEA Journal Vol 1 No 1  Copyright © 2000 Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association All rights reserved

Polon, Martin and Fredrickson, Scott (2000). Attempting to Use Legal Means for Protecting Music In The Era of Digital Technology Evolution,  MEIEA Journal Vol 1 No 1, 41-60. 

Attempting to Use Legal Means for Protecting Music In The Era of Digital Technology Evolution

by

Martin Polon

Polon Research International

and Scott Fredrickson

Loyola University New Orleans

Introduction

At no time in the history of recorded music, has technological progress in musically associated (audio) and disassociated (computer/Internet) technologies been perceived more clearly as threatening the rights of those who create and record music initially and those who continue to produce and distribute it. Having embraced the end of one millennium and the beginning of the next, we have to face the impact of the direct potential for inexpensive CD-R/CD-RW recording and the MP3 technology capable of copying music CDs via the Internet.

Today’s youth culture focusing on their music, is turning to bootleg MP3 Web sites where recordings made from front rows of concerts with mini-disc or DAT recorders and high quality mics concealed in clothing, are archived on the web for the use of everyone. Other youths are similarly configuring conventional CD recordings for their bootleg Internet sites. This underground music movement has grown up around a data compression technology called MPEG-1 Layer 3, popularly known as MP3, which can squeeze audio to less than one-tenth their original size. A song of near-CD quality that is 50 megabytes in size when saved in the traditional digital audio format can be squeezed to about 4.5 megabytes (Chervokos, 1998). Further, these recordings have no watermarks, these sites send no cookies and the MP3 technology is used instead of the streaming technology that is favored by the labels.

The use of recently released devices such as the Diamond Rio and the MP-Man portable players which connect to an computer’s parallel port through a docking station and allows for the storage and playback of up to 64 megabytes of MP3 files - the equivalent of a 75-minute CD - is proliferating. To the great consternation of the record community, these small units can be plugged into existing car stereos in the same way that a portable CD player is added externally or the MP3 music files can be cut to a CD-R for automotive playback.

Add the impact of MP3 search engines such as Napster, DVD-RAM, DVD-Audio, set-top network computers, electronic gaming, and Web TV and we have the potential for creating indirect competition between the trillion dollar computer industry and the 80 billion dollar recorded music industry...as well!

In August of 1998, both houses of Congress passed legislation in an attempt to bring the United States into accord with the previously established World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The measures H.R. 2281 in the House and S. 2037 in the Senate were merged into one piece of legislation. Each version, at the behest of the American record industry, went beyond the scope of the needs of the international copyright community and challenged the personal privacy rights of individual U.S. citizens and the long established Fair Use component of existing copyright law.

However, due to significant pressure from those concerned with privacy issues (and with the previously clearly defined home usage and copying privileges for recorded music), plus the added pressures of libraries, educational institutions, and John Q. Public, the legislation was changed. Savvy legislators in the House Commerce Committee and others in Congress drafted a composite final document consisting of pieces of the previous two versions and added more humane changes that were acceptable to most (if not all) of the players. The final legislation was signed into law by President Clinton in October 1998.

Since then, there has been a continuation in the pressure for further proactive legislation, placed on the U.S. Congress by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Record Label Issues

The record labels have exhibited both conflicting desire and fear of Internet delivery of music. These record companies and their agents such as the RIAA and IFPI support the concept of digital downloads by their member companies. They also have simultaneously advocated potentially privacy invading electronic software and hardware protections for their potential customers home computers. These include such items as digital watermarks, cookies, and software agents...as well as loathing the development of MP3 downloads to students on college campuses!

Watermarks

Digital watermarks are [hopefully ed.] inaudible, unerasable messages that contain copyright information (Newman, 1996). They have been devised to help solve the identification problem of digitally delivered entertainment products. This copyright information would be inserted into the music or video during the mastering process and would allow entertainment companies and law enforcement authorities the ability to track the source of digitally copyrighted material. The water marking process has legitimate uses in the apprehension of audio and video pirates who are in the business of duplicating copyrighted material either in CD form or through download on the Web.

One of the several major issues extant are whether the copyright protective information coded in the watermark is truly inaudible and/or transparent to the end user. One of the problems of the long forthcoming DVD-Audio system is that it uses low-bit-rate (psycho-acoustic) coding which removes what some scientists identify as non-essential elements of the musical performance. These elements may include but are not limited to those portions of the musical performance which may exceed mathematical standards for the averaged hearing capability of the home listener. Other portions of the performance which are theoretically rendered inaudible by virtue of competing musical sounds are also removed. In addition, a musical floor is established which precludes the existence of any sound lower in level than the floor itself. Depending on the coding system chosen, the floor is located somewhere between 30 decibels below the established norm for maximum undistorted sound level and 50 decibels below. The watermark is ideally placed in the coding floor, but if the coding is so drastic that the floor is high enough, the watermark could possibly become audible. This is one of the reasons that the DVD-Audio has been so long in gestation!

For example, a watermark inserted in a -30db coding floor is much more likely to become audible as some form of audio noise than a watermark inserted in a -50db floor. What this means musically is that listeners to high volume rock and roll are much less likely than listeners to classical or non-amplified folk music to hear the watermark.

The other strategic issue involving the use of watermarks is the fact that despite strong interest by the record companies to both enable legislation requiring watermarks and the need to protect forthcoming DVD-Audio disks from being copied, the current uproar against the concept of watermarking compact disks has meant that it would be many years before the great majority of available musical sources would be in a watermarked state! There are millions of compact disks in use which are not watermarked and even at this point in time, it is not clear that watermarking of CDs will happen soon if at all.

Cookies

The use of watermarks implicitly depends on a mechanism to record the presence of watermarked material on your computer hard drive. One way to do that is the use of the “cookie.” This snippet of computer code is basically a text based tag that a web site can insert on your computer identifying you when you visit their site, (Lappin, 1998) and indicating that you are an authorized user of the copyrighted material. It can also be used to gather information from your computer and hold that information for future retrieval. The term ‘cookie’ is supposed to have come from programmers who

-noticing the profligate character of these units found every-where on the web - were reminded of “Sesame Street’s” Cookie Monster. i.e. “Gimme Cookie.”

Despite significant concerns by privacy advocates as well as by the average personal computer user, cookies have become so profligate and insidious that virtually every Web site provider uses them today and individual computers may have as many as 100 cookies buried on the hard drive...revealing bits and pieces of personal information to those who placed the cookie initially!

Software Agents

Electronic media companies (a.k.a., the record labels and the movie studios), would like to be able to use a combination of watermarks and cookies coupled with software agents to interrogate every single computer as to the presence of illicitly obtained recordings and films. This desire has appeared time and again in the public utterances of these entities. That to some extent was at the core of the record labels approach to the WIPO legislation. These electronic agents could theoretically invade your personal computer searching for illegally obtained copyrighted material, and while they were searching, could gather other personal information and send it out onto the Web. These agents would also have the ability to send the user a notice that illegal music is contained on the computer and that a license for this is available (Sobel, 2000). The previously proposed versions of the WIPO legislation would have made it a crime to remove cookies or to thwart software agents from searching your computer. This would have made it the electronic version of the famous Federal mattress tags: Do not remove under penalty of law.

The failure of the electronic entertainment companies (up to this point in time) in obtaining binding legislation forbidding removal of cookies by computer owners and protecting the use of software agents, meant that this approach is moot, at least in terms of the power of Federal law. However, since it is estimated that as high a figure as 90% of all computer users on the Web do not know how to remove cookies from their systems, these option for the record labels and their movie studio partners remains open functionally if not directly as the letter of the law.

Mechanical Marking

A new California state law aimed to thwart piracy, went into effect as of January 1, 1999. This law requires all in-state manufacturers of optical discs to identify each disc with their name and the state abbreviation (CA). Thus, California becomes the first state in the United States to enact such a measure, which covers audio CDs, CD-ROMs, and DVDs, as well as masters for discs that are capable of being read by a laser on which data is stored in digital form (Jaffee, 1998).

The law carries fines for avoidance and/or criminally negligent ignorance (of the new statute), ranging from $500 to $10,000 and includes the possibility (no matter how remote) of spending up to a year in prison. The RIAA lobbied heavily in California’s legislature to gain passage of the bill but it was also supported by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Software Publishers Association (SPA), the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), and the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA).

Apparently California was specifically targeted by the RIAA and the other associated media industry working bodies, to be the first state to require the physical marking of optical discs. This because at least one third of this nation’s one hundred plus major replicators are located in that state. The legislation is considered by many in the replication business to be counter-productive since most (if not all) legitimate replicators already use a digital tag in the disk cataloging area such as the IFPI marking system and/or the Phillips SID system delineated in the so-called Red Book of CD standards.

Additional mechanical marking is essentially useless, since outlaw pressing plants use and will continue to use either false IDs or none at all. The cost of adding machinery to accomplish the physical marking will raise prices and could render California replicators non-competitive with out of state competition. Some fear that this legislation coupled with California’s high sales tax will force replicators to relocate to adjacent tax-free or lower tax states such as Nevada or Oregon. Although that is yet to happen in a major way, only time will tell as to the impact of the legislation.

First Sale

The previously established practice in the United States, of allowing the purchaser of recorded music a certain license, to make a copy of replicated music for non-commercial personal usage in or about the home, is now continuously under assault in the digital recording era. Under current law a person who has legally obtained a book or CD may physically transfer it to another person without permission of the copyright owner. Witness the proliferation of used books and CD stores. The electronic entertainment companies and their legal arms have stated recently at legal seminars and continuing education programs that these relatively accepted practices may apply in the analog domain. But these major ‘players’ assert that such consumer friendly covenants in the copyright law are irrelevant and non-binding in the era of all digital media and technology. Digital copying allows an ‘original’ copy to be made, whereas in the analog world, significant degradation of the signal quality was the result.

That is after all, what the record labels appear to see as the future of their business and why they are so determined to eliminate what they view as illicit home reproduction. The conflict in home taping situations is between the interest of copyright owners to receive an additional economic benefit from their artistic and distributive effort and the interest of consumers to make a copy of a lawfully purchased sound and video recording for their own private use. In the instance of home taping, the copyright owner has already benefited from the consumer’s initial purchase of the protected work, and a strong argument can be made that the additional economic benefit is unwarranted (Reyes).

Equally vexing to the record label community is the assertion amongst MP3 users that their placing of MP3 samples of records previously purchased legally, onto Web sites for free distribution is also acceptable. That argument is dismissed out of hand by the powers that be.

Fair Use

The Fair Use concept has become a virtual acceptance of home copying for personal use and in limited quantities, that most in the record label and legal communities feel is an anachronism. Gary Shapiro, Chairman of the Home Recording Rights Coalition and President of the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) stated in commenting on WIPO inspired legislation, “Once again the Congress has been asked to deny to consumers new models of VCRs, audio recorders, and computers unless they conform to any and all technological anti-copy schemes, both analog and digital” (Home Recording Rights Coalition - A, 1997).

The previous advent of digital audio recording technology prompted a series of already fought battles between the consumer electronic industry and the record labels (with their camp followers) over DAT and Mini-Disc. The resulting Byzantine and technologically bizarre Serial Copy Management System (SCMS), has pleased no one and is now being viewed by most as no solution at all.

According to several consumer electronic industry analysts, many lawyers working in the area of entertainment intellectual properties, quickly point out that Fair Use really is a political concept honored more in the breach than in the reality of legislation. Certainly, those working behind the scenes to support the now passed WIPO legislative effort, inserted language that could have limited if not eliminated all home copying, while acknowledging no homage to the Fair Use concept. Much of this language was removed in the composite final document.

From the beginning, U.S. copyright law has created tension between the rights of copyright holders and the public. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. When you read the Constitution, the purpose of copyright protection is very clear, says Adam M. Eisgrau, legislative counsel for the American Library Association. What the founding fathers wanted was to permit the flow of knowledge, and they said so in the Constitution (Gibeaut, 1997).

All of this despite the fact that the American public has come to accept Fair Use copying as part of their life style and their usage of consumer electronic wares for audio. In fact, some express fear that further proposed legislation and/or other measures and the loss of Fair Use would drive the public away from and prove disastrous to the consumer electronics hardware industry and ultimately for the record labels and movie studios producing software themselves (Home Recording Rights Coalition - B, 1998). However, the extension of that consumer attitude to accepting free worldwide access to MP3 selections, especially amongst college-age and high school-age young people is a legitimate concern for the record labels. Most feared is “the record labels make too much money as it is and music on the Internet should be free” attitude evinced by these MP3 enthusiasts.

Congressional Legislation

“Congress struggled with this issue for some time. What I’m concerned about is getting it [the legislation] balanced, but its hard when you don’t have many members of Congress who really are conversant about it or even care about it,” says Senator Patrick Leahy. He sarcastically recalls Congress’ other major foray into cyberspace, with the Communications Decency Act, aimed at keeping indecent materials from reaching children through the Internet. “It totally violated the First Amendment, but it sure was fun” (Gibeaut, 1997).

To illustrate the positioning of the various electronic entertainment companies vis-a-vis legislation they promoted the introduction of, during the last several years, it appears that they focused on the following issues:

First, proposed U.S. legislation would have made it “illegal to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component or part thereof that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological protection measure that effectively controls access to a work protected” (H.R. 2281, p. 9, sec. (a2), line 1).

Second, legislation stated that “no person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law intentionally remove or alter any copyright management system” (H.R. 2281, p. 13, sec. (b1), line 4). Legislation, on the other hand, would not protect individuals from intrusions into their computer that could violate core Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights and their previously unalienable right to privacy.

Third, the proposed legislation would have limited the ability of individuals to protect their own privacy from the cookies that could have been implanted on their computers and read periodically by software agents of the various copyright holders (S. 2037, p. 12, sec. (A), line 1). These software agents would, in theory, read cookies at a given time period in every computer connected to the Internet, for information on possible theft of (in this case) protected musical or video performances. There was also no mechanism for protection from hackers and other venal third parties who could enter a computer to gather data stored on these special cookies for their own subverted use.

Fourth, the term “technological measures” was not well defined. The proposed legislation would have punished a new crime called circumvention. Yet these terms begged for definition, or at least a categorization of what it is that is being circumvented. Congressman Dingell observed at one of the Subcommittee markup hearings for the WIPO legislation, that a bill that imposed criminal penalties, yet failed to define the key terms with respect to the conduct being punished, seems unconstitutional (Home Recording Rights Coalition, 1998 - C).

Without a definition, the term can mean literally anything; it need be related to controlling access to or copying of a work. That is why so much concern was expressed in drafting WIPO that computer viruses, programs that disable anti-pornography filters, etc., could have been legally protected from circumvention.

Fifth, the term playability was not well defined. Technological protection measures that rely on non-standard variations in signals (e.g. watermarks and copy control systems) may cause unintended problems. Although there were standards for transmissions and playback formats, the circuits of most consumer electronics and computer products are not standardized. So different devices from different manufacturers that would perform the same function could respond differently to the same protective measures. Therefore, a technological protection measure may work as intended on some products, but could cause adverse effects on others. In such cases, the consumer who purchased the product may have been a faithful and innocent customer for both the device and the program material, but may have received a defective presentation when combining the program and the device (Home Recording Rights Coalition, 1998 - D).

Congress finally reached agreement on enabling WIPO legislation including some elements of both the House and Senate bills. Obviously in neither case did any of the legislation reach levels of excellence that would have foreclosed future Supreme Court reviews or prevented a strong backlash from the privacy protection concerns of our European and other world partners. As of October 1998, The European Privacy Directive required that corporations get a person’s permission before collecting demographic or marketing information about them (Markoff, 1998). These firms must also provide access to all information they possess so that corrections may be made (Bray, 1998). These firms must give you full access to all information they possess about you, so you can make corrections if necessary.

The differences between European governments, which favored enacting laws to protect consumer privacy online, and the Clinton administration, which preferred to let electronic commerce industries regulate themselves, could delay the much-anticipated evolution of the Internet into a huge international supermarket of goods and services (Bray, 1998).

Privacy Standards

During 1998, this issue was raised by two proposed privacy standards: the Open Profiling Standard (OPS) and the the Privacy Preferences Project (P3P). The two standards basically were identifiers which are carried on your computer to signify your privacy preferences and to negotiate with web sites about giving away certain bits of information that you authorize and to withhold certain information that you don’t want to give up. It essentially [attempts] to automate the privacy process (Lappin, 1998). Sadly, these standards have been labeled as inadequate by European critics, in the face of the massive effort being made in the United States to gather information from computer users and to build these so-called privacy systems either singly or as a duality into the latest browsers from Microsoft and Netscape.

Yet all of this could be considered as a sidebar to the main event over Internet downloading, a phenomenon that will have far more real impact in the future than it does right now. The perception held by the record labels and the theatrical movie studios is that there is a fortune to be made in online downloads of their legally protected intellectual property and equally in protecting such property from the depredations of the likes of the MP3 ‘bandits.’ It is this perception of the replacement of conventional musical and theatrical software retailing with Internet downloading, that is at the center of all of the efforts that are being made on the several plains of legal and extra-legal action. Unfortunately, these self-same label and studio individuals also perceive that a large percentage of the population in the Western World would like to acquire these various entertainment media as downloads (movies, records) without paying for them. And to some extent, they may be right.

European Concerns

The concept of safeguarding these so-called legally protected intellectual properties via a massive revision of the

U. S. Copyright Act as part of an international initiative has come to the fore. Using revisions under the label of the “World Intellectual Property Organization,” entertainment lawyers working for various electronic entertainment organiza-tions targeted the WIPO revision process and loaded it from the

U.S. perspective. The use of language that would have madeit a Federal crime to remove from your computer the ‘cookies’ that proved that you had visited a web site providing illegal downloads, the desired legislation frightened many. Some in both the computer and legal communities trivialized the threat that this implies, by calling it the electronic equivalent of the content labels (tags) on mattresses that state “do not remove under penalty of Federal law.” The whole WIPO initiative, at least as far as U.S. electronic entertainment businesses are concerned, was viewed and still is by civil libertarians on both sides of the Atlantic as both draconian and dangerous, many months after its enactment.

The fundamental differences between nations who are part of the European Community and the United States over the many issues of consumer privacy has not yet prevented participation of the United States in WIPO activities worldwide. Concomitantly, a potential ban on the latest browsers in Europe and elsewhere made by Microsoft Corp. and Netscape Communications Corp. could still ensue. The ban would be at least a partial response to the cookie and agent software features so desired by the electronic entertainment community and others. As such, all are and have remained anathema to the European and American civil libertarians.

The European Privacy Directive, which essentially restricts businesses from collecting private, marketing and demographic information from and about individuals without explicit written permission, went into effect in October of 1998. It strengthened the laws of more than a dozen European governments whose statutes on cyber-privacy were already much more well defined and protective than those of the U.S. The Europeans were concerned that computer users within their borders might be on U.S. Web sites that would attempt to interrogate cookies with agents and that would violate the European Community laws and regulations. All of this could still bring a severe political clash between the U.S. and Europe ( Lappin, 1998).

In fact, the passage of recent Euro Cyber-Legislation on computer privacy issues and the expected passage of still other computer related legislation during the beginning of this Millennium could yet place the U.S. and the European community on a cyber collision course!

Music and the Coming Technological Culture Clash

The future of technological distribution of intellectual property as music or some other art form, has run into a culture clash unlike anything ever seen in past incarnations of this continuing battle. Ultimately, the issue of home music copying has become the touchstone of the battle, with various First and Fourth Amendment rights to privacy entering the fray as a powerful sidebar of Internet commerce in recorded music. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) plus all the other legal talents employed by the music industry are arrayed against young people who are the traditional retail target of the record labels, but who today reject the concept of paying for what was previously considered tangible intellectual property. For some time now, young people have been told that they will be able to download music off approved sites on the Internet instead of buying a CD in a record store. According to the forecasting firm Jupiter Communications Internet music retail business is expected to grow to $47 million in 2022 from $1.6 million in 1996 (Strauss, 1998).

Yet that figure could be in jeopardy if there is continued use of myriad MP3 sites for downloads into now legal MP3 portable players from at least half a dozen well known consumer electronic firms. The questions being asked by the youth of America include, “why would I want to waste my time doing a download and paying for something that is totally intangible, for which I will have no return rights, that I may not like, what if I don’t own a computer in my living room with my stereo, what if I really want to listen to all my music in my car, etc.”

The music industry has been reluctant to embrace this technology or even figure out a means to collect royalties. As one writer put it, the kids have voted, and the verdict is that they want to be able to download songs, Right Now!

(Goldberg, 1998).

What is so extraordinary about these goings on -WIPO and other more recent legislation otherwise - is that the real demographic pushing the intellectual property system to the end of its envelope, is the under 25’s who will not buy records from label Web sites. Instead we are still talking of cobbling together a totalitarian system of privacy invasion which the Europeans will totally resist and that will only work for the computers of the over ‘30s. These are the self-same over 30’s who will not buy music as downloads, who prefer music to be purchased as tangible CDs from such purveyors as Amazon.com and who do not have the time or inclination to steal or bootleg copyrighted intellectual property.

The bottom line here is that the electronic entertainment industry is creating a conundrum, which could eventually herald its own destruction over issues that are ultimately illogical. The individuals who will steal protected and unprotected intellectual property in the form of musical performances are those well under thirty years of age. These young people will download non-watermarked MP3 performances for their own use. Instead, the electronic entertainment community has come up with schemes that still could penalizes the over 30s who have no intention of downloading (legally or illegally) from the Web. These consumers of recorded music will use the Web to purchase commercially replicated CDs from such successful purveyors as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.

References

Bray, Hiawatha. “Europe draws line on privacy.” Boston Globe. October 29, 1998, p. C01.

Chervokos, Jason. “Internet CD copying test music industry.” New York Times, April 6, 1998, Sec. D, p. 3, col. 1.

Gibeaut, John. “Zapping cyber piracy.” ABA Journal, February 97, Vol. 83, p. 60.

Goldberg, Michael. “The audio distribution revolution is at hand.” Sonicnet Music News of the World, May 31, 1998. http://rl.sonic net.com/network/searches_frame.jhtml.

Home Recording Rights Coalition Update - A. “HRRC opposes H.R. 2281 WIPO Implementation Act.” July 31, 1997. http://info@hrrc.org.

Home Recording Rights Coalition Update - B. “House judiciary debate underscores HRRC concerns over impact of VCRs; HRRC welcomes open rule.” April 2, 1998. http://info@hrrc.org.

Home Recording Rights Coalition Update - C. “Support the Stearns-Boucher amendment to define ‘technological protection measure’ in H.R. 2281.” August 7, 1998. http://info@hrrc.org.

Home Recording Rights Coalition Update - D. “Is it legal to fix my picture?” September 24, 1998. http://info@hrrc.org.

H.R.
2281. “To amend title 17, United States Code, to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Performances and Phonograms Treaty. U. S. House of Representatives.” §1201 Circumvention of copyright protection systems p. 9, sec. (a2), line 1.
H.R.
2281. “To amend title 17, United States Code, to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Performances and Phonograms Treaty. U. S. House of Representatives.” §1202 Integrity of copyright management information, p. 13, sec. (b1), line 4.

Jaffee, Larry. “CA law requires id on disc.” Replication News. December 1998, Vol. 3, No. 12, p 1.

Lappin, Todd. “Online privacy. National Public Radio - Talk of the Nation.” June 30, 1998.

Markoff, John. “U.S. and Europe class over internet consumer privacy.” New York Times, July 1, 1998.

Newman, George. “Watermarks could thwart Internet piracy; embedded messages contain copyright information.” Billboard. July 13, 1996, vol. 108, no. 28., p. 8.

Reyes, Ramon. “Can the common law adequately justify a home taping royalty using economic efficiency alone?” New York Law School Journal of International & Comparative Law. 16 N.Y.L. Sch. J. Int’l & Comp. L. 235.

S. 2037. “To amend title 17, United States Code, to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Performances and Phonograms Treaty.” U. S. Senate. §1201 Circumvention of copyright protection systems, p. 12, sec. (A), line 1.

Sobel, Ron. “Panel discussion. Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association Conference.” March 31, 2000.

Strauss, Neil. “The CD format is losing its cachet as everyone with a computer starts recording.” New York Times. January 12, 1998, Sec. D, p. 12, col. 1.

Biography

Martin Polon received his Bachelor and Master of Arts in Television/Theatre Arts from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been on the adjunct teaching faculty of the University of Colorado at Denver - Denver, Colorado, the Interlochen Recording and Broadcasting Institute, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, teaching courses in The Audio, Recording and Electronic Entertainment Industries as well as the Board of Advisors for the Entertainment Industry, Extension Program at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Polon is the Principal of Polon Research International with practice limited to the econometric and ergonometric forecasting, measurement, and analysis of the impact of high technology electronic mediums and electronic media. He has prepared and presented over 100 papers, lectures, panel participations, chairing of symposia, and addressing national and section meetings of national organizations. He has written over 500 articles focusing on the future of electronic (audio, video, and computer) technology for entertainment, information and education and it’s impact on the daily lives of those who use the new technologies. This includes four columns monthly for EQ, One-To-One, Studio Sound and Television Broadcast magazines.

Biography

Dr. Scott Fredrickson has over 25 years experience in higher education and in the music industry. He holds degrees in Music Education from Cal-State University Fullerton, Business Administration from Pepperdine University, Jazz, and Music Business Administration from the University of Northern Colorado. His compositions and arrangements have been heard on local and national radio and television, and are being performed regularly in the United States and many other countries. Fredrickson has worked as a composer, arranger, director, and performer at theme parks, dinner theaters and corporate shows, and numerous commercial projects. He has produced and engineered many recordings of pop and jazz vocal music and is in much demand as a clinician, guest conductor, and festival adjudicator throughout the United States and Canada. His Scat Singing Method has been received enthusiastically by choral directors, and his articles on pop, jazz, and show choir techniques have appeared in national educational journals and magazines. He is the president of Scott Music Publications, and former editor and publisher of Pop, Jazz & Show Choir Magazine and has just completed a new choral music education text book entitled Popular Choral Handbook. He is also the former president of the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association and is a member of ASCAP and is active in NARAS, NAMM, NARM, AFIM, IAJE, ACDA, and MEIEA. Fredrickson is currently Professor of Music Business and Chair of the Music Business Program at Loyola University New Orleans and holds the Conrad N. Hilton Eminent Scholar in Music Industry Studies endowed chair.