Excerpt from today's TechWeb article:
In a statement issued by Diamond Multimedia, the company said it and the Recording Industry Association of America and the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies had resolved their legal issues and dismissed legal actions.
"The RIAA is pleased to bring a formal end to this legal process," said Cary Sherman, senior executive vice president and general counsel of the RIAA, which filed the lawsuit over Diamond's Rio, a portable device to play music in the MP3 format.
The Rio was the first device to reach the marketplace to play the rapidly growing format of digital music, which some see as threatening the very core of the music business globally by making it easy to illegally copy and distribute digital music files on the Internet.
The three litigants are cooperating in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, an industry group that is developing a technological method to enable the digital delivery of music and protect the rights of the artists and the owners of the intellectual property.
"We are pleased to bring an end to this dispute as we move forward on the development of secure e-commerce music offerings," said Ron Moore, Diamond Multimedia's general counsel.
Lucas Graves, an analyst at Jupiter Communications in New York, said the ending of the lawsuit demonstrated how the speed of technology was racing past the pace of the judicial system.
"The issues have been rendered almost moot by the advances in SDMI," Graves said. "The labels and the tech companies need each other too much in this evolving digital landscape."
The player makers need to have the cooperation of the record labels, which own the music rights, he said.
"The content is going to make the market, but the labels have to have the cooperation of the tech companies to manage rights," Graves said. |
