Corporations, CDs and Click Thru Licensing Loopholes?

oh the irony! asks: "The way the current legal/political/economic climate favors corporations and industry associations like the MPAA and RIAA in questions of intellectual property and copyright troubles me. But it has occurred to me that these tools could be used against the RIAA etc. The RIAA says peer to peer services like Napster were illegal because one person buys a CD and rips it so that a person who doesn't own it can listen to it. So...what if a Corporation buys a CD? Specifically, a corporation is legally a person and can own intellectual property as well as other property. If people are members of a corporation they can then legally use the corporation's property. I am not a lawyer but maybe Slashdot readers could tell me if my idea is legally possible or workable. It would be poetic justice to use Click through licenses and corporate law against the bad guys." Read on for more details on "The Idea".

"What if there was a peer to peer service that had a click through license of some sort that made each user a member of the corporation. The user uploads a CD and it becomes property of the corporation. The user retains the original CD as a distributed back up for the corporation. In return for this service (providing a safe place to store the physical CD, using their harddrive space to store backup copies, using the user's bandwidth to distribute these backups to be backed up etc.) the corporation lets the users occasionally listen to that music and other music the corporation owns as a form of payment.

Users are not receiving a service (downloadable music) they are providing a service (storing digital music for a corporation). They are employees of the corporation that get paid by the right to listen to the music.

This would only work if corporation was non-profit and decentralized, a co-operative of some kind without any ability to have control taken of it by someone who would then try to collect its property (the CD's)."

Comments

No way this will be legal

[Tom7]

The reason that copying CDs is illegal is that they are copyrighted, and copying and transmitting copyrighted works without the author's permission (except in cases of "fair use") is illegal. Though a corporation is certainly welcome to build a CD library and loan out physical CDs to its employees, copying them digitally is just a plain ol' copyright violation.

Corporate purchase != corporate liscense.

[gmiller123456]

Even if a corporation purchases it, it's still a single liscense and you're not entitled to the right to back it up under the DMCA.

Are the moderators using some sort of filtering for approving Ask Slashdot questions? Seems like if you have DMCA in the question, it automatically gets approved.

Re:Corporate purchase != corporate liscense.

[cpt kangarooski]

There is no license. It's just owned. Frankly the concept that software can be licensed generally (in the EULA sense, not site licenses or the GPL which is different anyway) is hotly contested.

Re:Doesn't really work

[jkramar]

However, if the corporation owns a copy of a CD, then only one person can listen at once, otherwise it becomes a 'performance', which you haven't bought the rights to when you buy a CD.

Your argument implies that listening to music without headphones is a copyright violation.

Re:Doesn't really work

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Your argument implies that listening to music without headphones is a copyright violation.

Taking the letter of the law, I think that that is correct. In practice, unless you are playing it for people who actually want to listen, and probably paying for it, you'd be vanishingly unlikely to run into problems.