SAN FRANCISCO, July 17: High-technology and Hollywood executives came to an impasse this week over who shoulders the responsibility of keeping pirates from stealing digital movies, music and other artistic works.

The debate possibly holds the future of the Internet as a key distributor of such works, which many believe is the next frontier for the online world.

On Monday, technology executives, including Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Dell Computer’s Michael Dell and Intel’s Craig Barrett, said in an open letter to entertainment industry executives that they were not about to create technology that limits computer users ability to copy and play digital media.

The letter was in response a missive from executives from Disney, News Corporation and others, urging curbs on technology that lets users freely copy digital movies, music and other content.

The debate was touched off in February, when the technology executives urged entertainment executives to cooperate in an effort to create standards for the safe distribution of digital works.

“We write to you to urge inter-industry cooperation to ensure that digital content can be distributed to consumers efficiently through a variety of means.”

The letter, addressed to then Vivendi Universal chief Jean-Marie Messier, Disney head Michael Eisner, News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch and others, vowed to come up with technology that would guard copyrights and trademarks for online content. These efforts include encryption and other technologies.

In April, the entertainment executives replied, saying they would cooperate if the technology industry reign in what’s called “peer-to-peer” — or P-to-P — practices.

P-to-P allows consumer computers to easily share digital content over the Internet. It was the central technology that fuelled Napster, the free music file swapping web site the courts shut down for allowing users to engage in wholesale copyright infringement.

P-to-P has been a sales boost to the ailing computer markets, as consumer buy more computers to copy movies and music in a burgeoning illegal worldwide file swapping network.

“This practice (P-to-P) harms existing theatrical, home video and subscription outlets, and discourages legitimate on-line services which cannot sell access to movies, music and other entertainment content that are available for free,” the entertainment executives wrote.

The technology leaders, however, are not ready to rein in P-to-P practices.

“Peer-to-peer technologies constitute a basic functionality of the computing environment today and one that is critical to further advances in productivity in our economy,” wrote back the tech titans on Monday.

Jennifer Greeson, a spokeswoman for the technology executives, said the debate is expected to continue.

“This is going to be a continuing process,” she said.—AFP