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Harvard Law's Nesson Says P2P Is "Fair Use"
eldavojohn writes "Ars has been covering the story of Charlie Nesson (alias 'Billion Dollar Charlie') of Harvard Law who's tangoing with the RIAA in court. His approach has been revealed in e-mails on his blog and has confused everyone from Lawrence Lessig to the EFF. His argument is simple: file-sharing is legal as it is protected by fair use. I dare say that even the most avid file-sharers among us would be a bit skeptical of this line of reasoning."
As much as I'd like to agree with him, I think someone's reaching just a little too far...
...going to Harvard is not a guarantee of sanity. Just looking at this guy's blog seems to confirm that suspicion. Of course, I wish him the best of luck! If he somehow manages to successfully argue his case, I will be very happy for him. Shocked, but happy.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I would like to say that Chebacca is a Wookie. Wookie are not from Endor, they're from Kashyyyk.
This does not make sense. What are Wookies doing on Endor? Why would an eight foot tall Wookie want to live with two foot tall Ewoks?
What does this have to do with digital piracy? Nothing. If this does not make sense then you must aquit.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
The plaintiffs in cases like these usually involves throwing as many claims as possible into the fan, hoping that at least a few stick to the defendant.
This is also a favorite tactic of prosecutors in criminal cases these days: pull someone over for speeding, and charge them with possession, molesting a teenager, carrying a concealed weapon, and reckless driving. Shock the defendant into pleading guilty to the reckless driving charge in exchange for dropping the rest, when in reality he deserved no more than a $200 ticket for speeding.
So in this case, why not claim "fair use"? Why stop at just one claim? Why not raise a thousand doubts about the legitimacy of the claims? It's certainly no worse (nor less truthful) than the RIAA claiming a million dollars in damages for putting 10 files up on an FTP site.
John
It's reasonable for an artist to expect to be able to profit from their work for a period of time. Protecting that right encourages others to spend the time to create similar work.
The problem is that now that "period of time" is effectively forever, which is bullshit. Those works become a part of the collective culture of a society and it's not right for corporations to continue to hold an intellectual monopoly on those works, long after the original artists have died.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
While lauded on Slashdot, Lessig only wants to restore copyright to the original length instead of abolishing it completely
Well now, that's just crazy talk. Restoring copyright to a reasonable term? Madness, I say. It's not far down that slippery slope before we get to the point where we give Congress the right to promote the progress of science and useful arts by granting time-limited monopolies to authors and inventors. How far we have fallen from the purity of our true common law roots! We must re-enthrone the true constitutional principle, embodied in the 32nd Amendment, that "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to keep and bear w4r3z w00t!"
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
The enormous benefit to who? Creators gotta get paid. Creators that never get paid stop creating, or at least stop doing very much creating because they are too busy doing some other job in order to pay the bills. Copyright, the idea that creators can exert limited legal control over who can copy their work, is a fairly successful real-world solution to this problem. And, on the whole, it's worked fairly well. Yes, things have started breaking down a little over the last couple decades and there are some problems that need to be addressed. A more limited term and more lenient fair-use and modification would go a long way. But content can NOT be free. It has to be paid for. The eventual viewer may not pay directly and instead pay through advertising or some such, but it's the same thing.
If copyright disappeared tomorrow, and I mean really disappeared overnight, the only new stuff showing up on the file sharing networks a week from now would be Linux builds. If, as a society, we decide that copyright is no longer working for us, we had better put an alternative in place before we pull the plug.
To you law students and young lawyers out there; please don't think you can learn anything from this case. Just ignore everything you are seeing from both sides. I have seen more bizarre filings from both sides' lawyers than I would imagine possible.
Sounds like this new exchange won't do anything to alter his opinion...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Although I have raised fair use as an affirmative defense in several cases, I haven't litigated any fair use defense scenarios yet, so I'm not going to be able to comment in depth, and I'm not going to get into any dialogue about it. Unlike Prof. Nesson, I can see no advantage flowing to my clients and future clients from my tipping my hand to the RIAA. When I have an argument to make, my adversaries can read about it in my court papers; and then we can chat about it on Slashdot until the cows come home.
But I will say this much for the benefit of my friends here:
1. Prof. Nesson and all of his assembled, learned advisors and cyberlaw scholars do the subject an injustice by overly simplifying the term "file sharing".
2. There are many different factual scenarios within the penumbra of "file sharing".
3. Some of those factual scenarios would clearly be entitled to a "fair use" defense; some clearly would not; some fall in a gray area. Contrary to what the 'content cartel' lackies would have you believe, and contrary to what Prof. Nesson's friends seem to think, we are at the beginning -- not the end -- of mapping out the boundaries of "fair use" in this area.
I will also interject, from a procedural standpoint, that I find it unusual and inexplicable that a conversation between an attorney and prospective expert witnesses would be posted on the internet; one would have to wonder whose side the attorney is on.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
It does, however, highlight the unfairness of a law that makes do distinction between commercial and non-commercial breaches of copyright.
Honestly, this just sounds like he's torturing the concept of "fair use" until it suits his purposes. If I look cross-eyed at the tax code for long enough, I wonder if I'll find a way to have the government give me millions of dollars.
Only if you're running a major bank or large manufacturing corporation into the ground.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The only alternative to copyright is... nothing. You can't copyright a concert. You can't copyright movie theater seats. Yet you can still sell those. If copyright disappeared overnight there would be plenty of things still being shared.
Stop think of P2P as the enemy... try thinking about it as "free publicity"
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
(didn't read tfa, but here's why I think we should be sharing information:)
Because we can!
Nevermind if it's fair use or illegal. We can enrich the lives of all mankind with a press of a button. Welcome to the 21:st century.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Based on the traditional four point analysis of fair use, the typical "file-sharing" /.ers are used to doesn't seem to fair too well:
1. The purpose and character - file-sharing is hardly transformative or derivative. You could argue transformation much better with things like mashups, etc. But torrents of movies and music?
2. Nature of the copied work. If it's factual, the infringer is on better ground - e.g., if you're a chemist who photocopies a journal article so that you can take the copy into the lab with you, rather than the entire journal. There are of course fair uses of creative works, too. This would of course depend on the individual work, not "file-sharing" as a whole, though probably the vast majority of file-sharing is in creative works, rather than scientific/factual.
3. Amount/Substantiality - well, most people I know torrent the whole film, not just 5 minutes of it, so...
4. Effect upon economic exploitation of the work - would seem to go against file-sharers. Obviously they aren't buying it! And by sharing it, they may be hurting the owner's ability to sell it, etc.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
It does, however, highlight the unfairness of a law that makes do distinction between commercial and non-commercial breaches of copyright.
The damages (as they are) to the rightful copyright holder are identical whether the violator made a profit off the violation or not.
If you own a copy of the work, and you use the p2p to get an alternate format of the same work, i would say it MAY be fair use.
If you use p2p to sample the work before buying it or not, it also MAY be fair use.
It depends ALOT of your local laws... the state of mind of a kitty in the other side of the world and the phase of the moon.
And... IANAL
If not Fair Use, how about individual Civil Disobedience? Consider filesharing as protected, not for profit, speech in protest of the decades of record companies ripping off consumers as well as artists through their longtime payola, high bar of entry for everything from recording studios to pressing plants, monopoly of the sources of production, distribution, promotion, and sales of music. And don't forget the bundling of 1 worthwhile song and 11 crap tracks in a highly overpriced, take-it-or-leave-it, CD, or the outrageous statutory damages that their lobbying and paying off of the politicians have jammed into Copyright Law. Oh, and did I mention their outright theft of the Public Domain. Songs copyrighted today will not enter the PD during the remainder of your life time. Not exactly what our Founding Fathers had in mind, having lived through that situation of eternal copyrights in Europe of the time already.
Yeah, I'd call that something to protest by any means possible.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Unlike Prof. Nesson, I can see no advantage flowing to my clients and future clients from my tipping my hand to the RIAA.
Which makes me wonder if Charlie Nesson might be leading the opposition down the garden path, attempting to bury any real leaks out of his student brain trust under a barrage of unrelated sideshow acts?
(I'm reminded of an alleged CIA tactic called "the second cover": You wrap the secret in TWO cover stories. The first is plausible, even if potentially easily detected as bogus. The second is the kind of stuff you read about in tabloids and certain late-night talk shows (some of which may be the fossils of old second cover stories). When somebody penetrates the first cover they find the second cover. At that point any of several things may happen, including: A) They believe the second cover. Hilarity ensues. B) They "recoil" back to the first cover. C) They become suspicious of any other reports on what is actually under the covers.)
(Then again, maybe Charlie's mind has finally gone. B-( )
As with NYCL's adversaries, we'll know what the Billion Dollar Charlie team's arguments REALLY are when we read them in the court papers. B-)
Meanwhile, if this is what is going on, I hope my speculation (if it has any effect) adds to the confusion rather than blowing the cover.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
4. Effect upon economic exploitation of the work - would seem to go against file-sharers. Obviously they aren't buying it! And by sharing it, they may be hurting the owner's ability to sell it, etc.
Or in favor... because for sure, there are no scientific studies regarding the issue (at least of my knowledge).
Sometimes a music becomes a success just because it was wildly distributed on the p2p.
Also of notice... "file-sharing" isn't only p2p... you can have file-sharing on almost all current OS...
Even windows has that capability since windows for workgroups... ;)
This line of thinking confuses the creative genius with the entrepreneur.
The entrepreneur anticipates consumer need and employs capital in production to satisfy that need. He does so for the sake of profit. The creative genius, on the other hand, is rewarded through the process of creating itself.
To dispense with economic theory, I fall into both categories. I run a business, but I'm also a musician and an artist. I've written, recorded, and released an album. I've written stories and painted pictures etc. First of all, I have never met a single musician who writes music with any kind of expectation of profit. Profit is never the motive. I've met and jammed with lots of people who perform for profit, or teach for profit etc. In these cases they see the value of their product or service and will exchange that product or service. However, when they sit down to write a song, they never consider exchange. They write for the sake of writing.
If you ask any of them, myself included, if copyright has ever aided them financially they will think for a moment and then, reluctantly, answer "no". However, that is not to say that they are against copyright. Usually, they like the idea of copyright because morally they dislike the idea of some "greedy capitalist" being able to copy / redistribute and make money using their creation. However, I then ask them whether their status as a musician, and consequently further prospects as a musician and song-writer, would be aided or hindered if others distributed their work for them ?
Then they pause and think.
As a song-writer our biggest challenge is distribution. Getting radio play is nearly impossible for an independent artist. The Internet has helped tremendously, but we still have to labour really hard to get our songs up on all of the music sharing sites. Even then, few people bother to listen to us because there's so much out there that people put up their filters and wait for their friends to recommend new stuff etc.
To go back to the economic argument, if radio stations and Internet start-ups did not have to worry about copyright then web-sites, and DJs and radio stations would play and share much more music than they do now. People probably wouldn't share much more, since most people share copyrighted music in spite of the law, but in theory artists would get much more exposure while having to do less. As a result, the better musicians could conceivably get a fan-base much more easily, doors would open for them and their prospects as a professional musician would widen.
In conclusion, the only people who actually benefit from copyright are the distributors. Musicians are not distributors. It's a hard business to distribute music, and it's much harder thanks to copyright. That's it's whole point. To keep competition out. Disturbingly, competition in the mainstream music industry almost always includes the artists themselves.
If the violator made profit, that could have went to the copyright holder. So there is a potential loss.
On the other hand, if there was no profit, it is not missing from the copyright holder either.
Every single good or service that has ever been invented has been done to satisfy some kind of need or desire.
When you buy something, you are acting to relieve some form of uneasiness. Maybe it's just boredom or to be part of a fad (the pet rock comes to mind), or maybe it's for survival (food, clothing, shelter etc.). But every single product or service has only existed because people, at the time they were consuming that product, felt that it made their lives better.
So if people are staying home to watch movies, then either the need that going to the theater once satisfied is being better satisfied by other means, or the cost of going to the theater is no longer in line with their subjective valuations regarding what doing so is worth to them, or the need has vanished all together.
Assuming the need is being filled by something better (or cheaper or both), we now have some new invention that replaces the utility of a movie theater. If movie theaters all go out of business then those entrepreneurs, capitalists and employees will go into production that fills more urgent needs.
This process always involves a restructuring and people will be temporarily unemployed. But any attempt to force conditions to remain the same will be futile in the long run, and will only prolong the restructuring process. It's thus better for everyone if the movie theaters either go out of business or shrink to satisfy a smaller market.
I'm sure NYCL or someone else who knows all the ins and outs can correct or expand upon this.
Don't be so sure.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
What makes you think that's sane?
The fact that I believe that people are entitled to have access to culture.
The working model here in the NL shows that you can guarantee the right to access cultural works, and still have a working healthy (lucrative) market for artists and the like.
I will also interject, from a procedural standpoint, that I find it unusual and inexplicable that a conversation between an attorney and prospective expert witnesses would be posted on the internet; one would have to wonder whose side the attorney is on.
The side of openness of information?
So if you hired a lawyer to represent you in a litigation, you would want that lawyer to be more concerned with the "openness of information" about your case than with protecting your interests?
You are a most unusual and wonderful person; I would like to meet you sometime.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Absolutely. But recording artists typically get nothing from RIAA's efforts to 'collect royalties and damages'. RIAA didn't create the work, why should they get the money?
How about we shred the 'work for hire' contracts of the media companies, make copyright a limited term and not transferable ( why should my great great grandkids profit on something that I created 20 years ago? ) to a corporation or 'holding company', and set it to expire after the death of the original copyright holder?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
If I were on that jury, most of his argument wouldn't sway me. But there's just one thing: the penalty. The penalty for copyright infringement is $150000?! If so, then copyright infringement must be a very serious crime, right up there with rape and murder. But p2p copying, which I would have assumed is infringement (because it seems like infringement in every way I can think of), obviously isn't anywhere nearly as serious as other crimes for which the penalty is $150k. Ergo, p2p copying must not be copyright infringement. If it's not infringement, then it must be Fair Use.
It's sort of the opposite of "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime." If the penalty doesn't fit the act, then the act must not have been a crime. Or maybe I'd borrow from a certain princess: The more you tighten your grip and increase the penalty, the fewer situations the penalty must apply. Somewhere behind the law, somewhere in its dark origins, is a motivation: fairness. If you defy the motivation for the law, then there is no law. When they set the penalty for infringement to $150k, they created new criteria for Fair Use.
I know there was a case here in Canada where the judge said the P2P was considered fair dealings.
Placing something in a public place is not distribution as each downloader is making a private copy. Private copies are fair dealings. The judge compared P2P to a Library that had copy machines. The book is in a public place, they provide the machine to make the copy but each person copying something from a book is making a private copy and that's ok under Canadian law.
This is why the Canadian version of RIAA has been pushing for new copyright law.
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
That's why one can say that people wouldn't buy the media if it weren't available as an unauthorized copy.
You don't even need to use that ridiculous $150k per mp3 the RIAA insists upon, just add the retail price of every work in a typical teen's computer and you'll see there's no way he or she could have bought it.
At $0.99 for a 3MB file that's typical of mp3 songs, every 100GB of media has a $30000 worth, if the retail price is used. How much do teens get as allowance? $100/week or so? Is it realistic to assume a kid would spend six years of his allowance on music, if he couldn't download it as P2P?
"Fair use" or not, the fact is that P2P harms no one. It doesn't take anything away from the legitimate owner, and there's no lost profit either.
First of all, I have never met a single musician who writes music with any kind of expectation of profit. Profit is never the motive.
I had to assume you're only working with small-time musicians, then. Copyright doesn't really help musicians until they start to gain a little bit of fame. And I've definitely heard musicians - small enough that you've never heard of them, but large enough that they're recording music - defend copyright vigorously.
As a song-writer our biggest challenge is distribution. Getting radio play is nearly impossible for an independent artist. The Internet has helped tremendously, but we still have to labour really hard to get our songs up on all of the music sharing sites. Even then, few people bother to listen to us because there's so much out there that people put up their filters and wait for their friends to recommend new stuff etc.
To go back to the economic argument, if radio stations and Internet start-ups did not have to worry about copyright then web-sites, and DJs and radio stations would play and share much more music than they do now. People probably wouldn't share much more, since most people share copyrighted music in spite of the law, but in theory artists would get much more exposure while having to do less. As a result, the better musicians could conceivably get a fan-base much more easily, doors would open for them and their prospects as a professional musician would widen
Copyright is not forced on you. You have the right to opt-out of copyright. You can go creative commons. You can declare that your work is public domain. There are even some publishers trying to make this system work (i.e. the musicians give-away their music for free; you can pay if you want, companies cannot use it for free - which is a creative commons licence). You can't use "musicians would be helped with no copyright" as an argument against copyright - because musicians *choose* whether or not they want their work under copyright.
In conclusion, the only people who actually benefit from copyright are the distributors. Musicians are not distributors. It's a hard business to distribute music, and it's much harder thanks to copyright. That's it's whole point. To keep competition out. Disturbingly, competition in the mainstream music industry almost always includes the artists themselves.
I think a lot of people would disagree with you. Maybe you're argument was only meant to apply to musicians, but as a software developer, there's not much sense in continuing to write software if I'm not protected with copyright.
That's wrong. Lessig wants to make filesharing legal. He's doing a lot more than trying to shorten copyright lengths back to "the original length".
It's a hard business to distribute music, and it's much harder thanks to copyright.
This is a really interesting point, since the whole PURPOSE of copyright is -- or was, anyway -- to provide a way to motivate and fund distribution.
The statesmen who wrote the first modern copyright laws did it because they didn't want books that people had written moldering away unavailable to the public simply because no publisher would take a chance on printing up copies that may or may not sell. The reason they were unwilling to take the risk is because if a book proved popular, other printers would quickly start churning out copies. Of course the original printer would still make money on a successful book, but not as much... and not enough to offset a number of unsuccessful books.
So, the copyright monopoly granted to the author enabled negotiation of printing contracts that guaranteed the risk-taking printer lots of money if the book succeeded.
History lesson out of the way, what you're saying is that, in your opinion, and with respect to music, copyright law is not only no longer encouraging distribution, it is impeding distribution.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This is probably the edge case. Probably not a public performance but there may be circumstances where it would be considered one - for example, if it was widely advertised and a large number of non-residents were there.
It's an "over the edge case" in my experience. We got busted for this years ago at my hall of residence, and the audience was entirely composed of student residents + a couple of RAs. That's right, the hall was no longer allowed to rent a DVD (or tape back then?) for the locals to watch in the main TV/rec room. Yet ff a student rented one, and watched it in a smaller floor TV room, that seemed to be OK...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Man, just talking about p2p music downloads and lawyers pop up! :-)...[I was smiling when I said that, good sir]
Thanks[again] for the relevant links in a timely fashion.
IMO, this is all just 'horse trading' in a way. Sooner or later, the extremes will negotiate to a mutually acceptable middle area....I hope.
Right now, the balance is tipped in favor of the labels/RIAA. Nesson is rabble rousing to try and tip it back towards the customers, or at least an even balance.
It's kind of like listening to Richard M. Stallman. Most people fall in the middle.
We are just watching to extremes squaring off. Maybe some good can come out of it. *crosses fingers*
Your thoughts are probably very comforting, and for mental hygiene purposes represent a perfect approach.
Unfortunately, to the imagination-challenged, faith-deprived, reality-based types like myself... it sounds like wishful thinking.
But from your mouth to God's ear.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Not all music, just the music that requires money to get it. Too bad artists. This fight has gone way beyond "supporting the artist." We are propping up a failed institution. Artists, you weren't going to get that hit album anyway, just keep driving the cab -- I know that's what I will be doing to pay the bills.
Music is not food, shelter or clothing. You can live without it. Don't buy any music affiliated with the RIAA and they will cease to exist/be assholes. I am going to start a band that makes songs that are almost the same as hit popular songs and give them away online as mp3 and ogg torrents. I kick ass at music production, so the copies will be good. I will study the law just enough to make copies that fall just outside any laws that say you can't copy a song. Change a note here, some lyrics there. Catch me if you can! All the kids will be dancing to my songs in the clubs and on the subway. In fact, that's a good hook. I will use that...
With software the "performance" is the creation of the source code.
On the other hand, distributing compiled code is not performance.
Its been realized by the leading edge for many years, that software needs to operate as a service's industry, unlike hardware which is a manufacturing industry.
Theaters are losing ground? since when? Just because the industry says so doesn't make it true.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I expect you'll get modded up further, but this is dead on. Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement. The method used to infringe the copyright is largely irrelevant.
The real questions in the RIAA trials are always: was a copy made? If so, was it an authorized copy? And, of course, the RIAA evidence gathering techniques raise plenty of questions on their own.
I expect Nesson's point is being transcribed poorly. I say this because, even though he's at Harvard, I expect a professor to get at least that much nuance in the law. Even if it's only his research assistants helping set him straight.
I should also point out that $150,000 per infringement is a statutory amount. That is, the copyright law gives that amount as the damages for infringement (or actual damages, whichever is more). That's both the incentive to register your copyright (it's good to stick a verifiable date on them) and disincentive to infringe. As a matter of personal opinion, it seems ridiculously high, and perhaps there should be more discriminating infringement penalties ($100 per copied song, for example), but I don't think a statutory minimum is a bad idea in the abstract. I know I'm in the minority, but I don't think copyrights should be entirely abolished. Made sane, sure. Completely removed, no.
--
IAAL, but not YOUR lawyer. This is my opinion, not advice.
While I freely admit that this is way out of left field, this isn't as far fetched as it may seem.
May I present for your enjoyment: The Betamax decision. It is the decision that allowed us to own a VCR, and it hinged on whether making a recording of live tv for personal use was "fair use".
Let's put it up agains those 4 rules:
1. Amount of work used: fail. Users recorded the whole program.
2. Impact on sales: fail. A strong argument exists that it reduces demand for sales of that video to people who may have already recorded it.
3. Transformative: Fail. Total fail.
4. Type of work: Fail. TV programs aren't dictionaries or encyclopedeas. Most TV programs are fictional dramas.
So, under the four rules, there is no way recording live tv could be fair use. But the court decided that it was. So personal use recording was called fair use, the VCR was allowed, the copyright owners lost. Incedentally, it meant that the VCR became widespread, and the copyright owners made squillions selling videos, but that's beside the point (or highly relevant!)
So, a court deciding against all 'reason' that what everybody does is fair has a precedent - so his suggestion is not as strange as it may seem!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Is it possible our sense of what is 'real' or 'fair' has been pushed so far to the 'right' by the outrageous tactics of the RIAA and idea of creation of "Intellectual/Virtual" Property, that we are perhaps buying into some idea of "fairness" as defined in an unreasonable system?
I.e. -- It's generally human to try to be reasonable (in a non emotional/non rant state). A tactic of Republicans during Clinton's term was to present such outrageous demands, that in order to seem "moderate", he had to stand to the right of the line that would conventionally divide Republicans from Democrats.
In a similar way, if the media companies present some outrageous version of reality that what is imaginary
or that which is 'thought' is now something that can be protected, then bought and sold -- that thoughts can be bought and sold, but they package it artfully enough, they might get people to buy into their version of reality and start creating a legal system to defend it. We might start thinking along the lines about what is fair and not fair within that 'created' system -- without seriously or critically thinking about the validity, or, invalidity, of the system created.
When a system starts needing such strong laws to protect it and massive threats of retaliation far out of proportion to the damage done or any sense of 'justice', one needs to look at why such harsh penalties are necessary to engender 'law abiding' behavior in a 'just and fair' society/system. Such outrageous penalties may be put in place out of fear of losing control -- because someone is trying to "legislate" something that is being artificially applied to society that goes contrary to human nature or contary to what is considered "innately" fair in that society.
It could easily be these problems arise because the new, 'created', 'imposed' is being seen as 'unfair' or not just by a significant percent of the population -- it's being forced upon the masses by those who can manipulate the media and legal system so that the average citizen unquestioningly accepts the premise and starts reasoning about 'fairness' within the newly created framework.
Perhaps someone with more advanced insight into the law and social-shaping by creating new "crimes" for new "virtual property" might have a view worth listening to?
you shouldn't have to read between the lines... furthermore if one is required to in order to understand any law they should no longer be held accountable for violating such a law.
to retort, if a layman cannot understand a rule they should not be held liable for violations of said rule.
so, if the law said simply: that individuals don't have the right to make 'any' copies of materials they didn't originally make without permission, or the right to aid others in experiencing or acquiring said illegal copies--whether it is known to them that they are illegal copies or not. then fair use would no longer exist, and file sharing and public displays of copied materials would be illegal.
however, the law does not say this.
personally, i think the whole ideas of piracy and copyright need to be redefined to disregard 'free use', and by that i mean any use that doesn't cause the user to profit. so as long as you're playing cam copies of movies in you garage for free for neighborhood kids, you cannot be sued or charged with a crime; and as long as you're not producing CD's or selling AVI's online for profit you cannot be sued or charged with a crime.
how someone could be charge with a crime for giving something away for free is beyond me. albeit i understand copyrights were put in place to protect an inventors right to profit from their invention... but wasn't it really to keep other people from profiting off their ideas, not to keep individuals from using those designs for themselves.
can't i go online and snag a copyright for a folding table, make it at home and use it, without being sued for copyright infringement. and what happens when i get a table from IKEA and give the table i made to my neighbor... am i a pirate for distributing copyrighted materials for free? could i go to jail or be sued yet again?
wouldn't that lawsuit be considered not only unfair, but blatantly stupid, and thrown out of court?
i see no difference between the table and an MP3 file.
if you look at the the whole situation as simply as you can it's ridiculous. and the solution is obvious. simply rewrite the laws to allow for 'free use' and 'sharing'. these things don't hurt anyone!! we're all taught they're good things our entire life!
i know i wont be teaching my children not to share for fear of punishment by selfish men, and neither should you.
DON'T CAPITALIZE! CO-OPERATE! AND FREE EVERYTHING!