Music and Movies

Music and Movies

MP3

The Moving Picture Experts Group Level 3 (MP3) was a computer format that compressed tens of megabytes of a compact disc (CD)-quality audio file into just a few megabytes, making high-quality digital audio easily downloadable. Music industry executives were concerned about MP3, arguing that it was being used to steal intellectual property. Many websites offered songs without copyright permission, posing a major threat to record labels and performers. Record companies launched efforts in 1998 and 1999 to bring what they saw as bootlegging under control. Still, some recording artists felt that MP3 might be a good thing, introducing a new way to bring their music to the public. Many musicians saw MP3 as a way to sidestep the powerful music publishing business and use the Internet to distribute their songs. With the introduction of portable devices in 1998, MP3 became the most popular trend in consumer audio. The portable digital music players stored music files on tiny memory cards and played them back. They held about an hour's worth of music, which could be changed as often as the user wished, and could be carried anywhere. In 1998 record companies sued the makers of a portable MP3 player in an effort to keep them off the market, but lost the case.

DVD

Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) is a high-capacity multimedia data-storage medium, designed to accommodate a complete movie on a single disk, as well as content rich multimedia and high quality music-channel audio. DVD started in 1994 as two competing formats, Super Disc (SD) and Multimedia CD (MMCD). In 1995 developers agreed on a single format called DVD, and in 1997 it became publicly available in the United States. DVD-Video, the first widely used application in the United States, was embraced by the movie industry, which wanted a CD-like disk capable of holding a high-quality recording of a full-length feature with surround-sound audio. By the end of the 1990s DVD-ROM, the format for delivering data and multimedia content that could be played by computers equipped with DVD-ROM drives, was forecast to grow even faster than DVD-Video. With its capacity to hold the increasingly complex multimedia applications that were being developed, DVD-ROM was used widely in the computer industry and for new video games with better and more realistic video content. DVD-Audio was scheduled to be released at the end of the decade.

Copyright Law

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton on 28 October 1998, prohibited "any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that … is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects the rights of a copyright owner." The act was designed to protect the traditional rights of the music recording industry and the movie industry, which saw a loss of control over their copyrighted recordings with the advances in technology such as MP3 and DVD, and the dissemination of de-encryption information over the Web.

Prosecuting Thieves

Material on DVDs was encrypted to prevent unauthorized copying. In January 2000 two judges ruled that websites posting copies of DeCSS software, designed to circumvent the copy protection of DVDs, violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. DeCSS was originally created by Norwegian programmers who reverse-engineered the DVD Content Scrambling System (CSS) to give computers running the Linux operating system DVD playback capability. The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued that the cases against DeCSS sought to censor free speech critical to science, education, and innovation. Reverse-engineering of DVD security systems, EFF contended, was important for system inter-operability, and for preserving individual rights in a democratic information age. Also, since the act only covered the United States, it could not guard against non-U.S. websites that posted de-encryption software. DeCSS was written outside of the United States, so it was not directly subject to U.S. law. Only U.S. based websites that carried the software could be prosecuted. The controversy over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act highlighted the difficulties that the U.S. government had in enforcing traditional rights of the music and movie industries over the Internet. These industries were in the midst of rapid changes that, at least in the short run, meant more power for the individual users and less control by big companies.

Toy Story.

In 1995 Walt Disney Pictures released the huge hit, Toy Story, the first full-length animated feature to be created entirely by artists using computer tools and technology. The completely 3-D computer-generated movie took four years to make. To create the movie, Disney teamed up with Pixar Animation Studios, a pioneer in computer graphics and the first digital animation studio in the world. The movie contained a total of 77 minutes and 1,561 shots of computer-generated imagery. Using their own proprietary software, with computers as their tools, the moviemakers introduced a three-dimensional animation look, with qualities of texture, color, vibrant lighting, and details never before seen in traditional animated features.

Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

George Lucas's long-awaited prequel to the Star Wars trilogy set a new benchmark for digital special effects. Of the 2,200 shots in the movie, 1,965 were digitally enhanced, Some of Lucas's fabrications were spectacular in an obvious way, such as the pod race; others were amazing because they were invisible. For example, if the director did not like an actor's facial expression in one scene, he would simply digitally replace it with a expression from another shot.

Sources:

Scott Bradner, "DVD and the Digital Copyright Act," Network World Fusion, on CNN.com, 4 February 2000, Internet website.

"DVD History," Disctronics Manufacturing (UK) Ltd. Homepage, 1999, Internet website.

"George Lucas," Time Digital, 27 September 1999, Internet website.

Ann Harrison, "Civil-Rights Group Blasts DVD Suit," Network World Fusion, on CNN.com, 19 January 2000, Internet website.

Rick Lockridge, "Downloading Music from the Internet; Theft or Democracy?" CNN.com, 3 March 1999.

Lockridge, "Music for the New Millennium is Bypassing Record Industry," CNN.com, 2 March 1999, Internet website.

"MP3 Revolutionizing Music Business," CNN.com, 2000, Internet website.

"Toy Story," MOVIEWEB, 1995, Internet website.