Launch of the Panasonic DVD-A720 audio/video player has been delayed due to concerns over music piracy.

The exploits of a Norwegian hacker against a prominent Japanese electronics company have highlighted a major fear of record companies: New digital technology could make it easier than ever to distribute pirated music over the Internet. Copy-protection concerns forced Japan_s biggest consumer-electronics company this week to delay by up to six months what it touts as a state-of-the-art stereo system. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic products, had planned to start selling its DVD Audio system in mid-December. A Matsushita subsidiary, JVC, also postponed its DVD Audio launch from December until May or June 2000. Matsushita has promoted DVD Audio as a better-sounding successor to the conventional compact-disk player. The new audio players are based on the same digital technology as digital videodisk players, which have boomed in popularity recently as a way of playing back videos at home because DVDs boast picture quality that is superior to that of standard videocassette recorders. In early October, according to Matsushita officials, a Norwegian hacker posted on the Internet a way to break the copy protection of digital videodisks. The hacker_s method required playing the DVD on the DVD drive found in some personal computers. Normally the computer software that reads DVDs would prevent the disk_s data from being copied But a defect in a version of the disk-reading software published by a U.S. company enabled the hacker to download the DVD data to his hard drive, the officials said. They declined to identify the hacker. Matsushita spokesman Yoshihiro Kitadeya said it wouldn_t be commercially viable for someone using the hacker_s method to make illegal copies of DVDs and sell them, although it would be theoretically possible. However, Mr. Kitadeya said, since music requires much less data than video, it would be easier to transfer individual songs from a DVD Audio disk into a computer file and distribute them cheaply over the Internet. Unlike analog media such as cassette tapes, digital data can be copied countless times without degradation.