Music Swappers Get a Message on PC Screens: Stop It Now

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>



April 30, 2003
Music Swappers Get a Message on PC Screens: Stop It Now
By AMY HARMON
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/30/business/30MUSI.html>

The record industry started another campaign yesterday aimed at
making life more uncomfortable for online music-swapping fans.

Thousands of people trading copyrighted music online yesterday saw a
message appear unbidden on their computer screens: "When you break
the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid
that risk: DON'T STEAL MUSIC."

The messages, which seek to turn a chat feature in popular
file-trading software to the industry's benefit, reflect the latest
effort among record executives to limit digital copying of their
products.

"People feel invincible when they're doing this in the privacy of
their homes," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry
Association of America. "This is a way of letting them know that what
they're doing is illegal."

The association plans to send at least a million warnings a week to
people offering popular songs for others to copy. Operated by a
company that industry officials declined to identify, the automated
system uses a feature in both KaZaA and Grokster, free software
commonly used to share music files, that was designed to let users
communicate with one another.

A spokeswoman for Sharman Networks, the distributor of KaZaA, said
that the tactic violated the company's user agreement, which
prohibits making search requests to accumulate information about
individual users. Sharman, which is based in Vanuatu, a Pacific
island nation, said in a statement, "We strenuously object to efforts
outside the law, in violation of user agreements, or in violation of
the privacy rights to indiscriminately spam, mislead or confuse" its
users.

Until recently, the record industry has been reluctant to act against
the several million people who copy music over the Internet from one
another for fear of alienating its own customers. But with CD sales
plummeting, the record labels have lately taken a more aggressive
stance.

The industry filed lawsuits this month against four college students,
charging them with copyright infringement and seeking billions of
dollars in damages.

Last week, the industry group won permission from a federal judge to
force Verizon to turn over the name of a subscriber it suspects of
providing hundreds of copyrighted songs through KaZaA.

Verizon is appealing that decision, but analysts said another court
decision last week might force the industry to focus on file traders,
rather than the software they use. A federal judge in Los Angeles
ruled that Grokster and Morpheus, two popular file-trading programs,
could be used for both legal and illegal purposes - like a Xerox
machine. Because the owners of the software cannot control what
people do with it, the judge said, they are not liable for copyright
infringement.

<snip>

Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>


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