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HATTIE: Isn't it getting more complicated? The whole idea of protecting intellectual property, isn't it more complicated today than ever before?

MARK: Absolutely. Part of it is because it is easier to steal. Part of it is because the difference between originals and copies get blended so quickly. Part of it is any time I can shrink the world to zeros and ones. You have people who are casual pirates and you have true businesses that are based on piracy. You can only litigate against some. You can educate everybody. What you need to do is teach everyone that it's wrong. What you call the casual end user, you don't want to sue them you want to teach them. The businesses based on piracy, you can't teach them anything. This is good vs bad and they're bad and you've got to bring in law enforcement and litigation and every tool you can against them.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Mark works closely with George Borkowski at Mitchell Silberberg and Knupp. Both are experts on intellectual property law. George was on the team that brought Napster to court.

GEORGE: The reason that Napster was important was it was the first case and probably the first big online challenge that said, "No. The copyright law is well thought out. It's been there for a long time. It protects certain fundamental principles and it has to apply to technology and it has to apply to the Internet." You don't get a free pass just because you're a technology company. You have to play according to the rules.

The Napster case started in 1999 into 2000. Napster was an online service that allowed users to log in and if they had copied music to their computers, they were able to offer their music to everybody else logged into Napster--and that was millions and millions of people. What that resulted in was millions and millions of tracks of music were being downloaded-- copied--without the copyright owners being paid for it. It was going on for quite awhile and it was getting bigger and bigger.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) The Record Industry Association of America recognized George's effort by presenting him with an honorary gold record.

GEORGE: The court said that you cannot have a company like Napster that actually helps people break the law, and helps people infringe copyright.

MARK: What Napster recognized is that people wanted it delivered in that way. People wanted quick, easy delivery of music to their CD players to their iPods to their computers. What it saw was the market there -- yes, it got there before the legitimate industry and the legitimate industry has now come in and gotten there as well.

GEORGE: It was never our intention to shut Napster down. It was our intention to make it act legitimately.

HATTIE: Because you won that case, how did it change the playing field?

GEORGE: It changed the playing field because it allowed copyright owners to have a legal tool to go after these companies. Without that we wouldn't have been able to do that. It was important to establish the precedent that these online services could be liable for copyright infringement on a secondary basis. Grokster and the other companies like it took the Napster model a couple of steps further. They broadened it so you could exchange movies, software, video games, photographs, just about any kind of digital -- anything that you could digitize, almost, you could exchange on Napster and these other services.

HATTIE: Wait, I didn't know about the software.

GEORGE: There was a lot of software on these services, that's right. You could find it. You could send it around. You could download it. It's not just music anymore. It's important the Supreme Court gave us at least some tools to be able to shore up the copyright owner side of the equation because the other side of the equation had plenty of tools the last couple of years.