Each Saturday, Canal+ will store every first division goal in video format on the Web. A quick click, and there is the goal everyone is talking about. The French pay-TV giant Canal+ will shortly be launching a satellite Internet access system. However, with a powerful enough computer, it is possible to decompress the data in software. Using a Pentium II 333 MHz machine running a Zoran decompressor, Intel showed clips of Goldeneye, The Bodyguard and other films, demonstrating that the picture quality was as good as, if not better than, a dedicated DVD player on a television set. With new home PCs expected to be 300MHz machines and decompression software getting better all the time, it could be movies all round by next Christmas.But disk-based systems are not getting things all their own way.

The Internet will be pouring into our homes and offices in new and super-fast ways over the next few years. Jim Griffen, the director of entertainment technology at Geffen, went on record last year in Forbes magazine, saying: “The reason we go after pirates is to clean up the Internet for commerce, otherwise anarchy reigns.”In the letter sent to FTP site owners, Geffen said: “Geffen, together with the rest of the recording industry, intends to stop those who take the work of our artists and redistribute it without permission. Universities and Internet Service Providers everywhere share our desire to ensure respect for intellectual property rights, and we will work closely with them, along with law enforcement authorities where necessary, to achieve respect for our artists’ rights.”Please don’t assume we are ignorant to the possibilities of digital audio – we have the same profit motive we’ve always had, and we want exposure for our artists and can imagine as well as you can the possibilities for selling and marketing music online.”The possibilities are extremely lucrative. How does it sound? I couldn’t tell the difference between the copy and the original CD track, as played through Mark’s PC.Unsurprisingly, the record companies are taking action against the MP3 pirates. Bad enough that they might be losing individual sales now, but they are also worried about controlling an emerging distribution network and future profits. Or download it over the Web in about 20 minutes, which at evening and weekend rates is not expensive.Mark is often online for 10 or more hours at a stretch over the weekend anyway, so he just downloads new files in the background while he gets on with Web surfing or e-mailing. You don’t have to be a sound engineer or have access to exotic equipment, either A decent Pentium-based multimedia PC does just fine.

If its specifications are good enough for playing games, they will be more than adequate for a spot of digital piracy.Although Mark is a proficient computer user, he’s not a programmer or a techie geek That doesn’t stop him making MP3s with no difficulty at all. All the software he uses to grab, encode and play back the files is shareware that can be downloaded from MP3 sites. Loading WinBac software on to his PC, he puts a music CD into his CD-Rom drive, selects a track and hits the onscreen record button. The WAV file produced as the track is “ripped” is big, nearly 45Mb.