The last two decades have produced a complete shift in the hardware that lets consumers control their entertainment.
Twenty years ago, cell phones could barely hold a charge, let alone take photos. Video games were everywhere, so the industry’s collapse caught the world by surprise. And television watchers could only dream of the day their beloved sets could hang on the wall like pictures.
Entertainment devices have become better at doing more than one thing. Smart devices and nimble software have given average Joes unprecedented control, especially over how they consume music and movies. The entertainment industry, in turn, has responded with digital codes, hidden flags and even lawsuits to control consumers’ access.
“There’s no trust,” says Brian Cooley, an editor with the personal technology site CNet.com.
Here is a timeline showing how we got here from there:
October 1983
Chicago test-markets the first cell phone, a device the size of a small brick that has a short battery life.
January 1984
The Supreme Court rules that Sony broke no copyright laws by selling Betamax videotape recorders, even though the devices could be used for copyright infringement. The Betamax case later would be cited in defense of everything from the Napster music-swapping service to the commercial-skipping feature of early Replay TV models.
1984
The $5-billion-a-year video game industry collapses with the arrival of cheap home computers that use televisions as monitors.
1985
Japan’s Nintendo brings the Nintendo Entertainment System video game to the U.S.
1989
Nintendo introduces the first portable handheld video game, the Game Boy.
1995
Ten DVD manufacturers form the DVD Consortium (later renamed the DVD Forum, with about 220 members) to set standards for DVD drives and DVD movies. Among the standards set was the Content Scrambling System, or CSS, which keeps people from copying DVDs.
October 1998
Congress passes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Among other things, the DMCA outlaws “circumvention devices” that give unauthorized access to a copyrighted work.
Summer 1999
Shawn Fanning, a student at Northeastern University in Boston, founds Napster as an archive of music files that can be downloaded. Millions eventually sign up.
December 1999
The Recording Industry Association of America, on behalf of its record companies, sues Napster for aiding the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted songs. After months of appeals, settlement attempts and the eventual sale of Napster, the pioneering service is forced offline.
January 2000
Police in Norway raid the home of Jon Lech Johansen, who was involved in the release of the DeCSS software, which defeated DVD copy protection. In January 2003 he is acquitted of Norway’s break-in laws for using the program to unlock DVDs he owned. He was acquitted again on appeal in December 2003. Shortly before the case was reheard, Johansen announced that he had created another program that uses Apple’s QuickTime to defeat iTunes’ copy-protection code.
2001
Internet gaming is introduced by Microsoft and Sony.
2002
The first combination cell phone/digital camera goes to market.
April 2003
Apple launches iTunes, an online music store that lets Mac users buy and download music for 99 cents per song, without subscription fees. The same day, Apple announces its third-generation iPod music player, for which the iTunes Music Store is optimized.
June 2003
The French company Archos introduces a large-screen, palm-size portable video recorder that ignores copy-prevention codes on DVDs.
August 2003
To bring down the cost of DVDs and thwart pirates, Disney tests EZ-D DVDs. The $7 discs become inoperable two days after being removed from their packaging and exposed to oxygen. The discs struggle to catch on, with a total of 38 movies scheduled to be available in the EZ-D format by Feb. 12.
September 2003
The RIAA sues hundreds of people, alleging they knowingly allowed song files to be downloaded from their computers by Internet users with file-trading software.
Also that month, BMG Music releases a music CD with anti-copying protection, a first for the company in the U.S. Within a month, a Princeton University student posts on the Internet that the copy-protection feature can be defeated by holding down a computer’s shift key while the CD is launching.
October 2003
Apple unveils iTunes for Windows. The field of non-subscription, pay-per-download sites has become crowded with such stores as buymusic.com and a retooled Napster. Soon, even retailers Best Buy and Wal-Mart will announce similar services.
January 2004
A federal court ends a case brought by five ReplayTV digital video recorder owners after 28 entertainment companies promised not to sue them for copyright infringement for using the “commercial advance” or “send show” features of their digital video recorders.
January 2004
The DVD Copy Control Association, a consortium of entertainment and technology companies, seeks dismissal of its lawsuit against a California man who republished DeCSS program.
