t happened, but Playboysomehow found out that this BBS had some scanned photos from a Playboy magazine, and because theyhave the copyright to all their photos, they were able to sue the operator of the Frena BBS. The operator had noidea that there were any Playboy images on his system (Elkin-Koren). Speaking of image files, they too can be a problem with software protection. Sayyou've got an image file that someone had copyrighted. You load it up in a photo-retouching program,and add a big old goat in the background and paint the sky red. Then you remove the artists file name. Viola, the picture is now semi-legally copyrighted to you, as it has been significantly changed from itsoriginal, although I wouldn't recommend going to court over it (Grant 12). All you have to do is change avery large portion of the image files coding. Technically, darkening or blurring the image, changingthe file format, or interlacing the file changes the file entirely, and thus, its yours. Sounds tooeasy? It is. Copyrights and patents are designed to help the media it protects. But in the caseof technology, its actually hindering it. CD-ROMs contain a lot of information, and are theperfect media for music. A lesser known media, the Digital Video Disc, or DVD, is much moreversitile, containing 26 times the storage compacity of a CD-ROM, and 11500 times more than a standardfloppy disk, or about 17 gigabytes (the largest hard drives are 9 gigs). However, DVDs are not available to thepublic. Why? Because of the ease of copying them. We've all dubbed tapes, its easy to do. However,we often opt for higher quality originals, because there is always a bit of degradation in the copies(although its very small now). With DVDs, a copy is exactly that, a copy. No degradation, no reason tobuy an original. All the big companies are really scared by this technology, because it will take anotherfive bucks out of their pockets. DVDs would be on...
