Copyrights

On Bangkok's Silom Road, the city's most fashionable shopping district, pushcart vendors peddle fakes on the sidewalk just a few quick steps from the real stuff in upscale boutiques. Cartier watches, Lee jeans and Lionel Richie tapes--every one a counterfeit--are pawed by swarms of tourists. A phony Gucci bag goes for $16 on the street outside the central Silom department store; the genuine article costs $140 inside.

Efforts by the world's trade ministers to jump start the stalled Uruguay Round of global trade-liberalization talks ended in disarray Thursday as an impasse between the United States and Europe over how far to go in reducing farm subsidies blocked progress on several other key issues.

In what was described as the largest single crackdown against video stores dealing in pirated videocassettes, police and investigators with the Motion Picture Assn. of America seized 10,000 illicit tapes and arrested six South Gate store owners, authorities said Friday.

Major recording labels, including BMG Music, Sony Music Entertainment Inc. and Warner Bros. Records, sued MP3Board Inc. Friday to prevent its Web site from linking users to pirated music on the Internet. The copyright infringement suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, comes three weeks after Warner and BMG settled a copyright suit with online music company MP3.com Inc., which uses the MP3 technology to store and transmit music over the Internet. The two companies are not connected.

Tom Waits won another battle in his long-running war in state and federal courts to keep his songs and likeness out of commercials. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that Third Story Music, the singer's former music publisher, does not have the right to sell his songs to foreign advertisers. In a previous case, Waits sued Frito-Lay and Tracy-Locke because they used a Waits imitator in radio ads for Doritos. In that case, a federal jury awarded Waits nearly $2.5 million.

Napster Inc. enlisted the help of Berkeley-based Gracenote in blocking copyrighted songs from its online music-sharing service, as required by a federal court injunction. A single song might be traded on the Napster service under a wide variety of names, yet the pretrial injunction requires Napster to block all such variants when notified by the labels or music publishers.

A federal appeals court is expected to decide today the fate of Napster Inc., the free online song-swapping service that has threatened the traditional business of peddling music to consumers. But no matter what the ruling, the very forces that want to see Napster brought to heel--the major record companies--are in no position to respond to the demand Napster stoked, industry analysts say.

In a big win for the entertainment industry, a federal judge ruled Thursday that it was illegal for a Web site publisher to either post, or link to, the software code that breaks the electronic locks on DVDs. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said this closely watched test case about copyright law and digital media should send a message that using the Internet to copy music and films is "stealing."

Cadence Design Systems Inc. said a federal judge ordered Avant Corp. to stop selling and using its ArcCell software, an expected move in Cadence's copyright infringement suit against Avant. The order from U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte in San Jose clarifies and reinforces his preliminary injunction of Dec. 19.