Even back then, however, the two were thinking about the Net equivalent of album covers or of the J cards that record companies used to tout cassettes. In other words they didn’t just post files of sound alone. They also pondered the use of files with pictures that music fans could download.
“At this point,” Patterson said, “it was still just a fun project. We didn’t think about making it a money-making venture at that point. We were just like, you know, ‘Let’s put bands up and see what we can do to mess with the record industry.’ We had this attitude like, ‘We’ll cut out waste in the industry.’ At that time there was, like, no press about us, so we weren’t really vocal, but we had those attitudes. We were kind of like naive and rebellious.”
Then an event happened that was almost as significant to IUMA as was the discovery of MPEG. Lord discovered the World Wide Web. “None of us,” Patterson recalled, “had any clue what it was. I think it was in December of ’93 that we got a hold of a copy of Mosaic.” They tried it out in a faculty lounge at U.C. Santa Cruz. “There wasn’t really much content on the Web at all. It was pretty much, like, weather satellites. We realized from that point on that we could really do something with taking the music and the pictures and using the World Wide Web as the way to present everything. People would be able to look at the album cover, read the text, see ‘play’ buttons. You know, press the play button, hear the music, and all that sort of thing.
“So,” Patterson said, “we called up the guy we knew from maintaining the FTP archives at U.C. Santa Cruz, and asked him what he knew about the World Wide Web.” Overnight he learned how to set IUMA up on the Web. His name was Jon Luini, and he would become a partner in IUMA, the co-czars’ “Kaiser.”
Meanwhile IUMA’s popularity kept growing, and soon the archives landed on SunSite UNC, a big digital library sponsored by Sun Micro Systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. IUMA would even make it to servers in Europe, so that people there could enjoy the music without tying up the trans-Atlantic connections. Other big companies, such as Silicon Graphics, took an interest in IUMA and donated computers and other gear.
But how were Patterson and Lord—and their musicians—going to make money off the Internet, where “free” was a religion and where commercial audio might be pirated? I loved the many legitimately free pleasures of the Net. It was truly for sharing. IUMA, of course, was offering lots of music at no charge. Via the World Wide Web, I myself was giving away a book chapter I’d written for a forthcoming information science collection; and I hoped that at least some material from NetWorld! would be retrievable without any money changing hands. But what to do about the darker side of “free?”
Sympathetic to the cash-short but clearly a realist, Lord told how casually kids copied computer games for each other. “There’s a complete underground going on,” he said, and he told how young hackers had secretly turned the IUMA archives into a site for stolen software. The mischief was hard to spot just by doing the usual check of the storage area.
“We deleted their stuff,” Lord recalled, “and left a note saying, ‘Leave us alone, you Rug Rats,’ because it was clear there were 13-year-olds doing it. Some of the biggest pirates in the world are younger than 15.”
His words rang true. Adolescents in the States were no match for the best pros abroad, but the teenaged pirates could still be awesomely well organized. One group of teens might crack the software. Another group might craft a slick screen telling who had defeated the protection. Lord told of a 13-year-old making $24,000 a year writing and selling shareware; and although the business was legitimate, this example showed the energy and brains out there among the young—in other words, the difficulty of fighting rip-offs.
Lord and Patterson were thinking about releasing IUMA offerings with digital identifiers that would make it easier to track down thieves. And yet another tack could be to design the music files that you could play only with the right digital keys. IUMA’s owners were of GenNet; they were more interested in relying on technology than law to thwart pirates.