Now there's Napster, which lets you download songs off the Internet and play them on your computer. The music-sharing site was ordered to stop making copyrighted materials available without authorization. Calif.-based Napster Inc. have sparked a wave of debate about online freedoms vs. the rights of copyright holders to protect themselves and their works. And while the recording, publishing and movie industries have always paid close attention to copyright infringement, they say the Internet has caused them to fear massive revenue loss more than ever before. But it's not that simple, says Robin Gross, staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Freedom Frontier.
Authors can prevent reproduction and distribution, and the public has the right to use it fairly.
Fair use and public- domain use let the public make a certain number of copies for personal use, Gross adds. For example, if someone copies a few paragraphs of a news article to include in a report, then it's probably fair use, because it isn't used for commercial purposes, the whole article isn't used and the copying doesn't affect the newspaper's market, Gross says. But it would be easier for the music and movie industries to use technology to protect copyrighted materials, rather than try to solve the problem legally, he adds. In August, however, a federal judge ordered 2600 to stop posting or linking to the software program that decrypts DVD player software and allows copying of movies. The old media are having a hard time struggling with a new distribution system.