[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Sometimes we don't have the technically correct words in our language to define some illegal actions but that doesn't make the actions ok.

I think that may be key to the matter here... electronic file sharing is so new that the laws haven't really caught up with them yet. "Fair use" is at best vaguely defined and understood.

wgrimm, regarding your TV analogy, "fair use" covers your watching a broadcast program in your home (which was already paid for by advertisers) as often as you like. It's when you either make copies of it to sell, or even give away, or when you invite others to see your copy in order to make a profit from their gathering, that it ceases to be fair use, and you are guilty of copyright infringement. (This does not apply when the program is live and not taped for re-watching, which is why bars don't have to pay the NFL to air a football game, say.)

"Fair use" also allows you to make as many copies of something you own as you'd like, as long as it's used only by you. When someone else gets the copy you made, that violates fair use. If you made the copy they stole, sorry, but that means you violated fair use. If they steal your original first and make copies, they committed the violation to fair use... not you. Get it?

I know, it's silly when you think about it... but the point is, the person who is considered guilty is the person who created the copy that is now in the wrong hands, whether that was their intention or not. That's more or less the letter of the law, though it should probably be altered to better satisfy the spirit of the law (in other words, to make you not liable when someone steals your Tivo'd season of "Lost" and resells it).

Originally Posted by wgrimm

I am wondering when the people in the US- us- stopped being marauding huns.

Who you calling a hun?

Originally Posted by Penforhire

I think you are confounding the issue of ease-of-duplication with fair use. Just because something is easy to duplicate perfectly does not mean I cannot make fair use. In my world the author still gets paid for one sale.

Actually, I'm not arguing against that, nor confusing them. What I am saying is that, in the eyes of the law, a copy you make of a protected work is still a protected work, no matter how easy it is to copy it, and you do not have the right to sell it to someone else (or even to give it away, really) without compensating the original creator, unless they expressly gave you permission to do so.

If you don't sell it, that's "fair use," and everybody's happy. If you do sell or give away the copy you made... even if, through intent or accident, it gets sold or given away... and even if it simply "gets out of your hands," and has the potential to be sold or given away... you are considered a violator of "fair use," and prosecutable to the full extend of the law. Remember the Thomas trial? That's how they got her. If she'd simply kept all her music copies off of the P2P networks, the RIAA wouldn't have had a leg to stand on, and she wouldn't be financially ruined now.