Chapter 6 - Case Study

Vignette: RIAA Fights Music Piracy

1. Is the RIAA’s strong stand on copyright infringement helping or hurting the music recording industry?

Answer:

       The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade organization that supports and promotes the creative and financial vitality of the major music companies. Its members are the music labels that comprise the most vibrant record industry in the world. RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate recorded music produced and sold in the United States.

       In support of this mission, the RIAA works to protect the intellectual property and First Amendment rights of artists and music labels; conduct consumer, industry and technical research; and monitor and review state and federal laws, regulations and policies. The RIAA® also certifies Gold®, Platinum®, Multi-Platinum™ and Diamond sales awards as well as Los Premios De Oro y Platino™, an award celebrating Latin music sales.

2. Could an ISP’s implementation and enforcement of the RIAA’s multitier strategy have a negative impact on the ISP?

 

Answer:

       The “gradual response” program works like this: ISPs will automatically monitor the Web activity of their customers. If a subscriber is found to be downloading copyrighted content illegally, their ISP will send them an “educational” notice saying such activity has been detected from IP addresses linked to their account. If that customer continues to download content illegally, the ISP will send “confirmation notices” to make sure they received the original notices. If copyright infringing activity continues still, the ISP then reserves the right to throttle Web access speeds, or cut off a subscriber’s Internet access altogether, at least until that user agrees to stop pirating copyrighted material. According to CNet, the ISPs have the option to skip these “mitigation measures,” and none have yet committed to completely cutting Internet access.

Lotus vs. Borland

1. Go to your school’s computer lab or a PC software store and experiment with current versions of any two of the Quattro, Excel, or Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet programs. Write a brief paragraph summarizing the similarities and differences in the “look and feel” of these two programs.

Answer:

        Some of Quattro Pro's features, such as Quick Filter and Cross Tab Reports, let users keep their data in Quattro Pro without having to convert to the tools found in a desktop database. Quattro Pro's Corel Real Time preview lets the user see formatting changes immediately within the spreadsheet, without being forced to apply the changes. Users can scroll through and previewseveral formatting options, such as fonts, lines, tables, borders, and shading. The user can see how the changes would appear and then apply the best one.

   Lotus 1-2-3 includes HTML 3.2 support for opening and converting spreadsheet selections to HTML documents. The product's Web tables let users bring live online information into the spreadsheet to perform analysis functions.

2. The courts took several years to reverse their initial decision and rule in favor of Borland.
What impact did this delay have on the software industry? How might things have been different if Borland had received an initial favorable ruling?

Answer:

         The outcome of this case caused quite uproar in the copyright law and computer software industry communities, Not only do they disagree with the judge's ruling, they also believe that such a ruling could lead to disaster for the computer software industry.

         Borland's will use  of the  1-2-3  menu structure  to allow  Quattro Pro  to play user-created macros would  essentially  expand the  scope  of the  1-2-3 copyright into  an area of expression  that  belonged  entirely  to the  user who  created the  macro, particularly in the context of the macro compatibility.

3. Assume that you are the manager of Borland’s software development. With the benefit of hindsight, what different decisions would you have made about Quattro?

Answer:

         I’d rather not to pirate one of the characteristics of lotus software, I will find other way to be able the company software’s to have its own and unique characteristics which are other software company’s don’t have, for the satisfaction of our loyal customers and avoid them to be confuse of software products and it’s characteristics.