On Friday, the Recording Industry Association of America filed suit against MP3.com, a Web site that last week started a service allowing customers to store and listen to their CD collections and newly purchased CD's from a password-protected account online. The real problem, said Peter Jaszi, a professor specializing in copyright law at American University, is that ''there are things in some of the laws which may tilt the results in a direction that is too restrictive as far as consumer interests are concerned.'' ''The media companies have a legitimate concern that the medium of the Internet enables piracy, but there is also an unsavory concern that they are losing their traditional distribution mechanism.'' ''What's really going on in these legal skirmishes is a broader conflict between traditional means of media distribution and digital means,'' said Mark Lemley, a professor specializing in Internet law at the University of California at Berkeley. It will fall to the courts to set the scope and application of existing copyright laws - both new laws and those enacted long before the Internet - to digital content. But at the heart of each is the question of what framework will govern the distribution of digital content. Three lawsuits in play last week all dealt with different aspects of protecting copyrighted works. The digital media market is still small compared to traditional media, but record companies, film studios and publishers are preparing for what they see as an inevitable migration of entertainment online. A flurry of court activities last week revealed a growing conflict between the entertainment industry, which is struggling to protect its products and profits in the Internet age, and consumer groups, which accuse the industry of interfering with free speech and people's rights to control their watching or listening experience.
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