On 4/26/99, Dirceu Pereira <dpsrosa[_at_]ax.ibase.org.br> wrote:
>
> Does anyone know a good source of information about copyright issues
> arising from the illegal copying of music through the mp3 format ?? or
> about the use of digital watermarks against possible copying of
> coptrighted materials?
At least in the United States, the legal issues are hotly contested. The situation is complicated by the US "Audio Home Recording Act", 17 USC sec. 1001 et. seq., which was enacted eight years ago to deal with Digital Audio Tape Recorders and has remained essentially uninterpreted by the courts due to the commercial failure of consumer DAT machines. Legal authorities in the United States disagree over whether section 1008 of the Act privileges consumers' noncommercial use of MP3 software to make MP3 files of musical recordings, and over whether MP3 players or recorders (hardware or software) need to comply with the Act's requirement for serial copyright management technology and need to pay the digital recorder tax imposed by the Act. The Rio case is raising all of those issues. Meanwhile, the RIAA is pushing its view of the law, under which it is never legal to make an MP3 file of a recording without the copyright holder's permission, and MP3 advocates like Michael Robertson at mp3.com are pushing theirs, under which leagal uses of MP3 compression technology far outweigh the illegal ones.
WIRED and C|net's news.com have pretty good continuing coverage of who is suing whom and who is knuckling under to whom. See WIRED's up-to-the-minute coverage at <http://www.wired.com/news/news/mpthree/>, and c|net's somewhat less frequently updated coverage at <http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,29980,00.html>.
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