The decision did not stop the entertainment industry from targeting, sometimes successfully, other products, including digital audio tapes, an early MP3 player and ReplayTV, a digital television recorder that also allowed users to skip commercials and send program copies to a handful of others.
In ReplayTV's case, the company was forced to shut down rather than fight industry lawsuits, said Andrew Wolfe, who was the company's chief technology officer. He said that once the litigation started, the company could not raise additional money from venture capitalists or other investors.
Elliott Frutkin, chief executive of Time Trax Technologies of Gaithersburg, said that while his product is in line with the law, some users of technology are bound to push legal boundaries.
(Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)
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The Peer-to-Peer Family: BitTorrent allows Internet users to share files at a faster clip than its more traditional peer-to-peer cousins. This graphic shows how it works.
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_____Story Archive_____
 • Disparate Cast Lobbies Court To Restrict File Sharing (The Washington Post, Jan 26, 2005)
• U.S. Asks High Court to Curb File Swapping (The Washington Post, Jan 25, 2005)
• Tech Firms to Seek Legal Protection From Pirating (The Washington Post, Jan 24, 2005)
• High Court To Weigh File Sharing (The Washington Post, Dec 11, 2004)
• Appeals Court Ruling Favors File-Sharing (The Washington Post, Aug 20, 2004)
• File-Swap Sites Not Infringing, Judge Says (The Washington Post, Apr 26, 2003)
_____Case Documents_____
• Archive FindLaw collected briefs, previous rulings, profiles and commentary on one Web page.
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"What would have happened if you applied these same standards [sought by the entertainment industry] when people were shown the first Xerox machine?" Wolfe asked.
The ReplayTV brand was later purchased by another company.
One problem, many technologists said, is that it is hard to know what the entertainment industry deems to be acceptable use.
The recording industry, for example, has never explicitly said whether burning songs to CDs is acceptable use, said Steven M. Marks, general counsel of the RIAA. But burning a CD and distributing it to others is "clearly illegal," he said.
There is also a difference of opinion about what someone can record with a VCR. According to the MPAA's Attaway, the Betamax case gave consumers the right to record over-the-air television transmissions, but not programs via cable or satellite TV.
Such distinctions could pose problems for the burgeoning business of digital television recorders, said Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, the lobbying arm of roughly 2,000 device makers.
"The content people will tell you that everything that is not authorized . . . is infringing," he said. "This is the corporate equivalent of living under a tyrannical dictator. You are not breaking the law, but you want to keep your head down and not be noticed because the dictator randomly kills."
In one ongoing dispute, the movie industry is challenging Federal Communications Commission approval of a new feature from digital-recorder maker TiVo Inc. that allows its users to make copies of digitally enhanced television programs and transfer them to a limited number of other locations.
