Word: morpheus
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...called Napster that made music swapping easy online. While Napster was subsequently hobbled by lawsuits, it pried open a Pandora's jewel box: Last year CD sales declined for the first time in a decade. Now, with the proliferation of a new generation of "file sharing" programs such as Morpheus, people are swapping TV shows and movies along with their music--more than 11 million Americans do it. And since the current programs, unlike Napster, are decentralized, it's much harder to shut them down...
...save television shows in pristine digital format directly from their TV, then watch them commercial free and send them over the Net to other Replay users. Hackers have even figured out ways to copy Replay files to their personal computers, where the files can be uploaded by users of Morpheus and similar programs for wider dissemination...
...Hollywood is not amused, and has filed two lawsuits: one against the makers of Replay, the other against the creators of Morpheus and two similar file-sharing services called Grokster and Kazaa. While it may be O.K. to copy a show for yourself on the VCR, "it's not O.K. to start sending it around and file sharing," warns Jack Valenti, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America. The first legal face-off begins March 4 with a hearing on the Morpheus case in federal district court in Los Angeles. The Replay trial is scheduled for August...
...while a circuit judge found that the service did have legitimate uses, she nonetheless forced the service to block the trading of copyrighted songs on the grounds that Napster had the ability to police the activities of its users and profited by failing to do so. The owners of Morpheus, Grokster and Kazaa, on the other hand, are expected to argue that since they don't use a Napster-like central server--even the indexing software is distributed among users--it is impossible for them to monitor the activities of the millions of people who use their programs...
...lawsuit, Diamond Multimedia (whose corporate name, perhaps not coincidentally, happens to be Sonicblue) won the right to continue marketing the first portable MP3 music player, the Rio, even though many people used it to play pirated copies of copyrighted music. As long as Sonicblue and Morpheus can demonstrate just two legitimate uses of their products--such as the trading of TV shows that are not copyrighted or simply saving a show onto the device for personal use--they could win their lawsuits, says Stanford law professor and cyberlaw expert Lawrence Lessig. "In order to innovate, you shouldn't have...