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The last week of July was a busy one for music industry attorneys, and by some measure a sucessful one. As almost everyone in the world is aware, on Wednesday, July 26, the Recording">http://www.riaa.com/">Recording Industry Association of America won a round in its fight against Napsterhttp://www.napster.com/">Napster;, a San Mateo, CA-based software company that enables the sharing of MP3 music files over the Internet. On that day, in a US Federal court in San Francisco, Judge Marilyn Patel decreed that the widespread sharing of music using Napster was a form of wholesale copyright violation, and ordered the service shut down effective Friday, July 28 at midnight. Napster appealed and won a stay of Judge Patel's injunction that will enable it to remain online and in business until at least mid-September.

It is shaping up as one of the big battles of the 21st century: content owners (who are not necessarily the artists who create content) versus the consumer electronics industry. On the one hand you have Hollywood with its record companies and the RIAA, and on the other, the manufacturers of products and technologies that facilitate the manipulation and use of digital content.

A "digital rights management" (DRM) company has been awarded a patent for its "tickets" to Internet-based entertainment. Bethesda, MD–based ContentGuard">http://www.contentguard.com">ContentGuard Holdings, Inc. announced July 27 that it has been granted a patent for its "digital ticket" system, which allows users access to digital entertainment—music, video, graphics, and e-books—from any Internet-connected device.

One area where DVD-Audio so far has an advantage over SACD is on the computer. To date there are no SACD-compatible personal computers on the consumer market, allowing the playback of a single-layer stereo or multichannel DSD format disc. One can, however, play a DVD-Audio disc on a PC using, for example, a Sound">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11454/">Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Copy protection efforts currently being initiated by national lawmakers at the behest of the entertainment industry are based on a model of Internet use that will soon become obsolete, according to Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig.

Although some record labels have scaled back plans to add restricted-use technology to all CD releases, efforts continue to find the protection formula that consumers, and in particular record labels, will accept.

Blaming a falloff in CD sales on the popularity of CD burners, BMG">http://www.bmg.de/">BMG Germany recently issued approximately 100,000 copy-protected discs in an attempt to thwart the problem—and had to take a substantial portion of them back because consumers said the discs wouldn't perform in car players and in some home audio systems.