Quote:
Originally Posted by volwrath
It is a slippery slope, but its also called fairuse. So if you bought the latest Rush CD, should you not be able to rip it to .mp3? After all they sell digital equivalents at iTunes, so by your reasoning, you are stealing the mp3s by ripping them.
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I understand that US law allows the copying of music from a CD one owns. But it does not allow one to download an mp3 from a third-party site. At least I think this is what the courts have said.
There seem to me to be many ways of arranging a set of copyright laws that balance encouragement to content creators and availability to others. One particular set of laws has been chosen in the U.S. by duly elected representatives. The set of laws chosen is far from perfect, but nonetheless it is not clearly unreasonable on the whole. It seems reasonable, for instance, for a publisher to be able to charge you more for getting more and less for getting less, thus charging you $25 for a hardcover, $35 for a hardcover plus one electronic copy, $45 for a hardcover plus an electronic copy you can convert to arbitrary formats for personal use, and $20 million for a non-exclusive unlimited distribution and use license. The present set of copyright laws makes such tiered pricing possible, and it seems like a set of laws that make this possible is not a clearly unreasonable law.
Once laws are chosen, if the laws are not immoral or clearly unreasonable, we the subjects of these laws need to obey (or leave their jurisdiction).