You know, I don't know that changing the law would help. I could make a really good arguement that the reason we are in this quandry in the first place is because the law was not followed in the Sony decision allowing for a "personal" copy. The "fair use" section of the law was clearly meant to allow for academic and journalistic discussion of art, it was not meant in spirit or wording to allow for consumers to make "personal copies". Common sense applied to the situation back then might say a personal copy is OK, but the law doesn't really, and if it had been followed, all these devices for copying may not have been developed in the manner in which they were, or Congress would have been forced to change the law to somehow allow for personal copies but without the free-for-all we have now.

Copying of CD's to your hard drive is assumed to be legal because that specific point I don't believe has ever been challenged. And it hasn't been challenged because of the Sony decision way back when.

Because of "fair use" as defined by the courts, it is much harder to prove what on the face of it is copyright infringement. Basically with file sharing, you have two choices, infringement of the right of reproduction, or infringement of the right of distribution (or both). I've seen some very good arguements (that will probably ultimately be defeated) that say simply having files on your hard drive that others can access in and of itself is not distribution. That point has not been decided by a court yet. And that is probably why it appears the RIAA, while saying sharers are violating distribution rights, appears to have pinned the cases on evidence to prove violation of the right of reproduction. As far as the right of reproduction, this is made harder to prove because of "fair use" because the copy on the hard drive may be a "legal" "fair use" copy. So, what the RIAA has done is take advantage of the fact that when you rip a copy of music from a CD, the ripped copy is not an exact digital copy of what is on the CD. All CD media have "error rates", and in ripping, on first pass if the software cannot figure out if a bit is a 0 or a 1, it guesses based on some algorithm. Therefore, you have on the hard drive an inexact digital copy. The hash (adding up all the bits) on the original CD might be 1,000,000, while the hash on the copy to your hard drive might be 1,000,051. That's a simplified explanation. The thing is though, when copying that digital file around the world in Windows, you are making exact digital copies of the source. So, every copy you make has a hash of 1,000,051. That is how they traced files back to Napster, and that is the technology the RIAA is using to prove the file on your hard drive is not a "legal" personal copy. There are some holes in that arguement as well, one would be that there is now software available that will rip an exact digital copy of a CD (it uses several passes and takes longer), which may eventually render trying to prove infringement of the right of reproduction in regards to a song on a hard drive impossible. All because of "fair use" as defined by a court long ago and never challenged anymore.

Anyway, the feeling I get despite new technologies that come along giving music a new place to go (ringtones, etc,), and despite the ideas that Brian has floated that making paid downloading easier than free is the way to combat free downloading (but then what to do about CD burning - where one kid buys a copy of a CD and then burns 50 for his friends?) is that a permanent, irreplaceable music market share has and is being taken away because everyone has a printing press in their home. Movies are next...Book publishers should be thankful not many people want to read a book from an etch-a-sketch, as they would be crazy to put large portions of their content in digital form. The barriers to copying a book into the form people want to read it in (paperback or hardback hard copy book) are still high, so digital form would be really stupid right now. And, back to music, even paid downloading gives away the store to some extent. The usage rules for some services allow for unlimited burning of singles to a playlist, copies on up to 5 computers, like copies to three ipods, so on and so forth. That's a lot of copies floating around for the price of one, and the days when someone might actually buy one copy for home and one for the car, for the time being, seem to be coming to a close.



[This message has been edited by Liszt Laughing (edited 09-18-2003).]

Boo...my name is Doug