Word: copyright
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Further, if you willfully infringe on that right by copying works valued at more than $1,000 in total over the course of 180 days, you’ve committed a felony according to Chapter 5, section 506 of the United States Copyright Code. It’s also pretty obviously stealing, at some level: Consider that the subway service is another monopoly bestowed by the government, this time upon the MBTA. Much as with music sharing, the marginal cost to the government of your not paying your fare is very nearly nothing and yet I think most reasonable people...
...illegal (or even whether it’s “stealing” in the semantic sense of the word) is not, I don’t think, the correct question to be asking. Rather we ought to be asking ourselves how the notions and the codification of copyright, originally laid out in the Constitution and subsequently modified dozens of times to include such specific provisions as how many feet of bar space an establishment must have before they pay royalties on the music they play over their loudspeaker, conform with our intuitive judgments of the purpose copyright...
What are these judgments? Historically, copyright law has concerned itself, appropriately, with copying: the creator or copyright holder of a work had the exclusive right to control whenever a copy of their work was made. This is just about perfect with books or VHS tapes—we want creators to be able to control the distribution of their work such that they receive proper attribution and compensation, and yet we want to ensure that the people who buy it have the right to read, lend, sell, annotate, discuss or even burn their copy as they desire. This has been...
Barring such activities is clearly not the intent of copyright law. No one ever wanted to tell you that you couldn’t read a book that was printed in China or watch a video tape at the full quality allowed by your television set. What should have happened as technology pushed the powers of copyright law outside of their intended boundaries was a careful evaluation of how to frame additions to the code that bring it up to speed without breaking its underlying principals...
Unfortunately, this sort of balanced assessment has not been the impetus for changes in copyright law over the past quarter century. Consider for example section 114 of the copyright code, which more or less exempts satellite radio networks predating Jan. 1, 1995 from the obligation to obtain permission from a songwriter to rebroadcast their music. There were to my knowledge exactly two such networks before that date, XM Radio and Sirius, and it is wholly unsurprising that these remain the only two that are successful today. If you’d like to enter into this potentially lucrative industry...