BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, JULY 6, 1999) RICK LOCKRIDGE, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Standards to be announced Wednesday by the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a group of computer and music companies, will finally clear the way for the major record labels to make their top tunes instantly available.</s>JIM BURGER, COMPUTER INDUSTRY ATTN.: Rather than going down to your local store, you have the option of firing up your computer, of downloading from the Internet a bunch of music you like, and having that music conveniently right there at your home.</s>LOCKRIDGE: When an agreement was finally reached on a Secure Digital Music Initiative, it gave music lovers around the world hope that the big five record companies would unlock their big collections digitally so they could be shared. And before SDMI, they refused to put their songs on-line for people to download. So what the SDMI did, was give people hope that, at some point, there would be a set of standards that would allow music lovers to download hit music from the Internet and still the record companies and the artists would get paid for it. But you couldn't legally download hit songs from the Internet because of copyright issues. For it to become legal you had to get the buy-in from the record companies, and they wouldn't do that until a standard was developed that would protect them. And once the music companies has this sort of technological assurance, well, then they would be willing to put their music out there on-line for everybody's download. There are a few artists who have their music out there on-line for you to purchase, but not very many yet. They are working on the technology, but some people believe it is doubtful it will ever really exist.
CNN 20: Digital Music Deal, July 6, 1999