Court allows online music recorders.

Not long ago, digital copying of music from the Internet was the province of high-tech pirates, with followers in college dorm rooms around the country. Gradually, the established recording industry has come to terms with a practice it once denounced as a threat to the rights of artists and publishers. And now a federal appeals court has given the process a legal stamp of approval. In a 3-0 ruling Tuesday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a 1992 federal music piracy law does not prohibit a palm-sized device that can download high-quality digital music files from the Internet, letting music listeners play them at home. The court upheld a federal judge_s refusal last fall to issue an injunction sought by the Recording Industry Association of America, representing five major record companies. After losing the earlier ruling, the industry has tried to come to terms with the new technology and develop a version of the device that would prevent illicit copying. The decision came as supporters of MP3 gathered in San Diego for a two-day summit focusing on the legal, technical and business issues influencing the movement toward Internet-based music distribution. John Perry Barlow, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, said the victory shows that 'music is the common property of humanity and it_s a form of sacrilege to try and own it.' Barlow, the lead off speaker for the summit, is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which promotes freedom of expression in the digital media. Copyright law has value when it allows artists to have some control over their work, but the control should belong 'to those who create, not the bottling plants,' Barlow said.