HDTV sets are stunning—until you pop in a movie and are reminded that DVDs are not recorded in high definition. At 480 lines of resolution, they don’t even begin to take advantage of a 720- or 1,080-line display. That will change later this year when Toshiba introduces the first high-def disc player for the U.S. market. Toshiba’s breakthrough box, an HD DVD player that at press time was still unnamed, will cost about $1,000 (toshiba.com).

In the MGM v. Grokster case, several major record labels successfully sued a group of peer-to-peer (P2P) software companies for producing software that permitted copyright infringement (that is, online trading of commercial music) when the court believed that a different, less-efficient design might have prevented it. The justices ruled against P2P companies Grokster and Streamcast because they believed that the companies intended for their users to infringe copyright with their service.