In a move that may heat up a legal fight over music downloaded from the Internet, Samsung Electronics will market its portable MP3 music players in the United States later this year, the Korea Times reports.
News of the first big-name electronics manufacturer producing equipment that plays MP3 software could raise the ire of the recording industry. It is now pursuing legal action against a smaller company, Diamond Multimedia, which markets a similar portable MP3 unit called the Rio PMP300.
“It’s significant because [Samsung] is a major electronics powerhouse, someone with a major manufacturing capacity,” said Michael Robertson, founder and president of online music distributor MP3.com
Like the Diamond player, the Samsung unit will play MP3 software that is widely available for free on the Net. Internet sites worldwide distribute MP3 songs, many of them pirated from compact discs.
Despite their small size, MP3 advocates say the format delivers CD-quality sound. Downloading them is effortless. Even a few years ago, downloading a song from the Net might have taken 20 minutes, but MP3’s MPEG-1 Layer 3 data-compression format cuts that to less than five minutes.
Samsung expects to ship its players by December 1998 to US and Asia-Pacific markets. The street price is between US$159 and $229, according to the Korea Times report.
Samsung representatives could not be immediately reached for comment.
Upon initial assessment, the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the industry in the suit against Diamond, said the new players may fall into the same category as the Rio.
The RIAA is going after the Rio on the grounds that it is a recording device, and therefore it falls under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. That act requires manufacturers of digital-recording devices to pay royalties to the music industry and implement copy-protection technology on their products.
Last Friday, a US District Court in Los Angeles issued a 10-day restraining order that prevents Diamond Multimedia from releasing any further Rio players.
A second trial is scheduled for 26 October, when the court will examine the arguments in greater depth.
