Word: napstering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just an inaugural skirmish in a protracted legal battle against online video piracy. Movie moguls might ask their colleagues in the music biz for a few pointers on this. For the past three years, record companies have been trying to turn back the rising tide of online music trafficking. Napster, the pioneering Web service that allowed computer users to share their libraries of MP3 tunes, lost a high-profile court case against the big record labels in 2001 and is all but out of operation. But similar services have emerged, and many think a decline in CD sales...
...Napster's heyday, pirated TV shows were a rarity on the Net. But that changed with the advent of broadband home connections, $40 TV tuner cards that snap into your PC and cheap ways to store data. Looking for episodes of Friends? The MPAA counted more than 5,000 locations on the Internet last year where people could download episodes for free. Using custom software to track copyright violations, it also found 4,000 sites for The Simpsons and 2,000 for The Sopranos. Big Pussy is not going to like that...
...case of Napster, 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...
That's what it feels like to use the three paid digital-music services that are jockeying for your pocket in the wake of the old Napster's demise. They are MusicNet, owned by three of the five big record labels; Pressplay, owned by the other two; and a prelaunch trial version of the newly legal Napster. All three are so restrictive, you would think you were downloading homeland-security documents, not 'N Sync. And because the record labels are still squabbling about Internet licensing, nobody has a complete selection except those street-corner kids: morally dubious services like Morpheus...
...Napster's trial version has much the same paltry-selection problem. But assuming it can get its hands on some licenses before it launches, the struggling service shows more promise than its record-label rivals. True, most songs are in the protected .nap format, which means you can't burn them onto a CD. But there are a few independent labels that let Napster offer MP3 files that are yours for life. It is hoped more labels will follow suit...