Mntsnow
01-08-2003, 7:38 AM
A difference between American and European copyright law threatens to carve out a free-swapping zone for popular decades-old music, hampering record companies' antipiracy efforts online.
European and Canadian copyright protections for sound recordings last just 50 years, compared with 95 years in the United States. As reported earlier in The New York Times, that means that a boomlet in sales of bootlegs of 1950s artists, ranging from Miles Davis to Elvis Presley, is becoming perfectly legal.
And it also means new headaches for record companies trying to shut down file-swapping services. As those popular older songs fall into the public domain overseas, people there are free to offer them on services such as Kazaa or Gnutella. Although it's still illegal to download the songs from the United States, it's much harder for copyright holders to find people who are downloading, as opposed to uploading, specific files online.
"There are some implications for enforcement, creating an additional wrinkle," said Neil Turkewitz, the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) executive vice president for international affairs. "But it doesn't affect the legality of a U.S. user accessing a foreign hard drive and downloading a file."
The expiration of copyrights overseas is just one piece of an antipiracy puzzle growing increasingly complex as the use of modern computer technology and high-speed networks increases around the world. Record labels and movie studios have fought periodic battles to shut down foreign Web sites that offer copyrighted material and to sue file-swapping companies such as Kazaa's Sharman Networks that are based overseas.
Read the Full Story (http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979532.html)
European and Canadian copyright protections for sound recordings last just 50 years, compared with 95 years in the United States. As reported earlier in The New York Times, that means that a boomlet in sales of bootlegs of 1950s artists, ranging from Miles Davis to Elvis Presley, is becoming perfectly legal.
And it also means new headaches for record companies trying to shut down file-swapping services. As those popular older songs fall into the public domain overseas, people there are free to offer them on services such as Kazaa or Gnutella. Although it's still illegal to download the songs from the United States, it's much harder for copyright holders to find people who are downloading, as opposed to uploading, specific files online.
"There are some implications for enforcement, creating an additional wrinkle," said Neil Turkewitz, the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) executive vice president for international affairs. "But it doesn't affect the legality of a U.S. user accessing a foreign hard drive and downloading a file."
The expiration of copyrights overseas is just one piece of an antipiracy puzzle growing increasingly complex as the use of modern computer technology and high-speed networks increases around the world. Record labels and movie studios have fought periodic battles to shut down foreign Web sites that offer copyrighted material and to sue file-swapping companies such as Kazaa's Sharman Networks that are based overseas.
Read the Full Story (http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979532.html)