Word: copyright
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...company has often argued that the major record labels have failed to keep pace with the American consumer. And instead of working on its technology sprinting skills to catch up, the Recording Industry Association of America has cried copyright foul. The RIAA sued Napster for "contributory copyright infringement," and won a preliminary injunction against the company late last month in Federal District Court. But a higher court of appeals dismissed the injunction several days later, and oral arguments have been scheduled for September. Intellectual property experts and philosophers have tossed in their opinions, some supporting copyright law in its current...
Lofty allusions to copyright sanctity and public morality from both sides cannot hide the fact that the metaphorically big, fat, slow RIAA got outrun by the agile Napster in this technology race. Simply put, no major record label website puts so much music online. No major record label site is as easy...
...almost philosophical note: he complains that the entertainment industry has a knee-jerk instinct to try to stand in the way of technological progress. It's something the music industry has been accused of since 1908, when it went to the Supreme Court to argue, unsuccessfully, that its copyrights were being violated by player-piano rolls. More recently, in 1984, the movie studios went to the high court in an unsuccessful attempt to block Sony from selling VCRs. There's a pattern here, Napster's defenders say: copyright holders have always resisted new technology and then--as with the movie...
...Boies starts by saying copyright does not apply to noncommercial uses like Napster. The service is free, and users don't charge one another for the music. So, he argues, it isn't piracy at all. He also notes that in the VCR case, the Supreme Court endorsed the idea of "fair use"--that if a product could be used for a legal purpose (like taping TV shows to be watched at a more convenient time), the product itself was legal. Boies says Napster also relies on fair use. In addition to copyrighted songs, it offers files from...
...small computer files that can be transferred over the Internet. To do this, the movie is copied off an ordinary DVD using a program called DeCSS. (The legal status of DeCSS is a gray area, to put it mildly; one of its distributors is currently in court for violating copyright law.) In the next step the movie is squeezed down to a manageable file size. Your average movie takes up about four gigabytes in digital form. Using a compression standard developed by Microsoft, of all companies, and hacked by those enterprising programmers, DivX squishes movies down to fewer than...