Quote:
Originally Posted by bingle
BTW, not-for-profit copyright infringement wasn't illegal in the US until the 1997 "No Electronic Theft (NET) Act". Prior to that, there were no criminal penalties for freely distributing copyrighted material without commercial gain.
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I don't know about your apple replicator (it seems to me that the energy to produce the mass has to come from somewhere, so you're probably being charged for it, either that or everyone produces food this way already, and something other than material scarcity is driving the economy).
But I'm pretty sure there were criminal penalties in the US for distributing copyrighted material before 1997, whether for profit, for free, online, by sneakernet, or encrypted on stone tablets. The NET Act may have made this more explicit, but it really just reiterated existing copyright law, didn't it?