Word: grokster
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Fast-forward a generation. This time the supposedly disruptive technology facing the film industry is peer-to-peer networking. Whereas the original Napster offered free music only and was easy to shut down, its successors--Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus et al.--trade movies too and have proved more resilient. The music labels fought all instances of unfettered file sharing until Apple CEO Steve Jobs helped broker a cease-fire in the form of the iTunes Music Store, which won praise from consumers and a route to profits for the labels. The film industry, however, is still in the trenches, trying...
...industry's efforts to block the new technology in the courts aren't going well. Last month a Federal Court of Appeals declared Grokster and Morpheus as legal as a VCR or a Xerox copy machine, whose legitimate copying uses outweigh illegitimate ones. The movie industry is furious. "These are folks who hide behind a curtain of plausible deniability, like they don't know what's being traded on their networks," says Dan Glickman, a Clinton Cabinet member and former Democratic Congressman who took over the helm of the MPAA after Valenti retired...
...legislation that would essentially target file-sharing technology. If passed, the so-called Induce Act, backed by such powerful legislators as Senate majority leader Bill Frist and Senator Hillary Clinton, would close the legitimate-copying loophole and empower the MPAA to sue peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Grokster after all. Opponents of the bill include usual suspects like the Electronic Freedom Foundation--the A.C.L.U. of the digital world--but also a surprising number of big businesses...
...legal fight is far from a sure thing. Copyright laws are slippery and subjective--the judge in the Grokster case made a special plea in his ruling asking Congress to fix gaps in the laws that cover file sharing. Enforcing those laws is also tricky. Colleges, where a lot of the downloading goes on, like to think of themselves as bastions of privacy and free speech, not copyright police. The international reach of the Internet makes enforcement even dodgier. Case in point: in 1999 Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, figured out how to break the copy protection on commercial DVDs...
...compression technology, and the spread of faster broadband connections, video distribution over the Internet is becoming more practical. Now, digitized recordings of content ranging from 30-minute TV sitcoms to two-hour Academy Award winning films are flying around in cyberspace, aided by free file-sharing programs like Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa...