Word: napsterized
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...People like Chaplin pose an increasingly worrisome problem for the $80 billion television industry. Just ask anyone who works in the music business, which in 1999 was upended by a free music service 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...
...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...
...constantly trying to download the films. "We try not to let people download movies because downloading takes up a higher amount of bandwidth," says Tan. "Also, we don't want people to download the movies and sell them on the street. That's what happened in Taiwan with Napster - all the college students started selling CDs on the street of songs they downloaded off the internet. We don't want people to do that with our movies. We want to broadcast them so people can watch them...
...long as we are operating under the laws of the Republic of China (Taiwan), we don't need to go to other companies," says Tan. "This is not like Napster because people cannot download the movies. We just want people to be able to watch movies online. These Internet movies do not compare to the quality you see in the cinema or the theater. We are not trying to get business from Hollywood. I don't like watching movies online. If I like a movie that I see on the site, I'll go buy the DVD and bring...