The Copyright Wars

A brave new world of digital entertainment at your fingertips awaits, but this future risks being stalled by the lack of consensus on digital copyright control. The consumer electronics industry wants abundant content to be readily and cheaply available to drive the sale of new products; the entertainment people want fair remuneration for the use of the content. These potentially contradictory goals are leading to heated battles.

In its May special report, IEEE Spectrum looks at the "Copyright Wars" in all their aspects. The legal battleground is hot--and dangerous, as loss here can mean death to a company. Compact discs were originally issued without copyright controls, and the industry is scrambling to retrofit that technology, but consumers are fighting back. The record industry used the court system to defeat Napster, but is turning to guerilla warfare to beat back Napster clones. By contrast, DVDs were originally designed with copy protection as an intrinsic part of the technology, but since a hacker broke that protection scheme, the industry has been trying frantically to replace it.

Meanwhile, digital broadcast television today is not protected, and discussions over methods to do so have broken down. Debate on this front is expected to get noisier as digital receivers make inroads into what was formerly analog territory. And the swords are drawn in the legislative arena in Europe as well as in the United States.