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Complete Story at news.com.com.
When Tim Davis got caught trading songs, it made him semifamous. Davis, an artist who teaches photography at Yale, was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America last September and was featured in news articles around the world.
Since then, he has made his plight a public cause to help recoup the $10,000 he spent on his legal defense and to settle the lawsuit. He sold "Free Timmy" T-shirts and held a fund-raising party at his studio. Visitors to his Web site, davistim.com, can leave a donation in an online "tip jar." The lawsuit, he said, is "an insane kind of disproportionate response" to his musical sins.
Then there is Jeff, who trades movies online. Jeff, who lives in New York and discussed his situation only on the condition that his full name not be used, received a letter from his cable company explaining that New Line Cinema had found a copy of "Freddy vs. Jason" available for sharing through his Internet account. The letter noted that the movie industry did not know his identity but could go to court to discover it and might eventually sue him. "It gave me a little scare," he said.
There are many more music traders than movie traders, but there are many more Jeffs than Tims these days. While the recording industry has made headlines with a few hundred lawsuits, the movie industry has been sending out hundreds of thousands of threatening notices via e-mail messages each week to the people who make its products available on the Internet.
The music industry's approach has contributed to a decline in downloading but has also produced a powerful public backlash, angering millions of its customers. That is one reason, among others, that Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said that his industry would not be following the music companies' path any time soon.
"I'm not ruling out anything, but at this moment we don't have any specific plans to sue anyone," Valenti said. "I think we have learned from the music industry."
Executives at the technology companies that serve both industries say that the movie industry, while avoiding some of the record industry's pitfalls, has not yet made enough progress on other fronts to head off a Napster-like disaster.
Experts in digital technology say Hollywood is fooling itself if it believes that its current steps will be enough, or even that they will take the industry in the right direction.
Gary Johnson, the chief executive of PortalPlayer, a company that makes the technology that helps consumer products like Apple Computer's iPod play music within the boundaries of licensing agreements and copyright law, was particularly blunt.
"We're not sure the lessons that were learned in the music industry have been picked up yet" in the world of video, he said.
What the industry needs, technology executives say, is to look harder for tools and contracts that allow people to get the movies they want at a competitive price, rather than concentrate on actions that restrict access.
"The film industry has a tremendous opportunity in front of it, and the bar is very low," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a company that tracks file-trading activity for the entertainment industries.
The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: "Why do they want to steal from us?" The answer, he said, is simple: "Because you won't sell them what they want." The technologists say that what went wrong with the music industry can easily go wrong for movie companies, too.
Steve Perlman, a longtime executive in the technology industry who co-founded WebTV, said that because music companies had resisted online trends and did not make their wares readily available, "a pirate way of accessing content became the best way of accessing content."
When a movie first appears, illicit copies show up online for the taking almost instantly. "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,'' which was released on Dec. 17, is already available on several peer-to-peer services. Most of the higher-quality copies come from within the industry, often copied from "screener" discs sent out during the annual awards season.
Davis, the former song trader, has changed his habits. He dusted off his turntable, bought a new needle and started haunting the bargain vinyl bins in junk shops, where he has discovered some treasures for a dollar a record.
"I'm really very excited about it,'' he said, "because there isn't much new to buy out there, is there?"
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