Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
I don't think anyone (including the industry) really intends to stop such innocent uses on a small scale. But one really should draw a line in not downloading anything from the darknet and (much worse) uploading anything. If the great majority really agreed on that, there would be no need for any DRM or restrictions that prohibit us from doing what we always did with pbooks. Anything that goes on between members of a family and a few really good friends, who cares? Sure, there would still be a darknet, but the people using it wouldn't matter for authors and others hurt by it now.
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Don't kid yourself. The industry wants to abolish the legal concept of "fair use" and replace it with a market concept based on what sells their product. Look at Amazon, which "permits" you to allow other people to have limited access to copies of ebooks which you buy - but only if those other people have Kindles. Look at Disney, which successfully got Congress to extend the life of copyright to the point where a product doesn't enter the pubic domain until your grandchildren die. Look at the music industry, where musicians successfully copyright a drumbeat or brief musical phrase. These days, Glenn Miller would not have been able to play In The Mood, because the musical riff it was built on was not original.
Left to its own, the market monetizes everything. Copyright law was not supposed to merely protect the authors and publishers - it was suppose to draw some boundaries to protect the public. Those boundaries are being erased by technology, even though they are still on the books, legally.
The industry does not believe in "small scale innocent uses." It wants to capture every half penny of such use. What really defends us from the industry is practicality, not the good will of the industry.