TV and radio are truly strange delivery mediums for copyrighted work. If some salesperson walked up to your door, knocked, and then handed you a ten dollar bill without any sort of agreement, you'd own the bill. A salesperson might do that if they wanted to make sure you'd listen to their pitch, but you wouldn't have to listen. You could just close the door because no agreement was made.
Television and radio networks offer TV shows and music in the hope that people will then listen to a sales pitch. As a result, when they deliver a show or song to your house, you own that copy of the show or song. Because you own that copy, it is legal for you to make a backup of it, or format shift it, or time shift it, and hand that exact copy to a friend. All of that is legal because of the right of first sale. The fact that time shifting is legal has been affirmed in several court rulings.
Don't get me wrong though. You only own the exact copy that was broadcast. If you duplicate it, then hand an extra copy to a friend, you're illegally distributing a copyrighted work. Of course, that brings up the whole ludicrous nature of the beast beccause the network really gave you an undefined number of copies, since you could have any number of recording devices in the house. But, if you try real hard to ignore artificial nature of the boundaries, it all kind of makes sense.
Napster would be a great source for a real expert. However, I want to blow off steam.
I strongly support Napster's right to do what they do, but my support has nothing to do with music.
Napster is simply and only a search engine. It has an advantage over Google in that clients that wish to share files must let Napster know that the files are available. Therefore, it can do a better job as a search engine for a particular type of file because those who wish to share that type of file jump up and down and yell "look at me" until Napster indexes their files.
Other than that, if you examine what Napster does at a programming level, it looks exactly like what Google does, or Altavista, or Yahoo.
Napster is being sued because of the content that it indexes as a search engine. No other search engine has been sued for indexing copyrighted content (that I know of). ISPs have been sued, individuals have been sued, Universities that host files have been sued, but no other search engine has been.
If Napster goes down then a fair application of the law will take down Google, et. al. Of course, there won't be an equal application of law. Can you imagine anyone sueing Google to force Google to block all files that contain references to an ftp site with copyrighted files? I thought not. Neither should Napster be responsible for the content it indexes.
Just for kicks - go to Google and type "pink floyd mp3". You'll be able to download copyrighted material from one of the first ten links. The only redress that record companies have to prevent this is to contact the site that hosts the files and tell them to remove the files or be sued. Google has no liability.
A more effective approach (actually used in some cases) is to encrypt the message and then encode it into an existing image (or any sufficiently ineffecient binary format). If you're careful about how you do the encoding the image won't look any different. Since it's more likely that friends will send each other pictures than spam, the FBI would be less likely to look into it carefully anyway. All you have to do is be a little careful about how you do the encoding so as not to mess up the picture.
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Television and radio networks offer TV shows and music in the hope that people will then listen to a sales pitch. As a result, when they deliver a show or song to your house, you own that copy of the show or song. Because you own that copy, it is legal for you to make a backup of it, or format shift it, or time shift it, and hand that exact copy to a friend. All of that is legal because of the right of first sale. The fact that time shifting is legal has been affirmed in several court rulings.
Don't get me wrong though. You only own the exact copy that was broadcast. If you duplicate it, then hand an extra copy to a friend, you're illegally distributing a copyrighted work. Of course, that brings up the whole ludicrous nature of the beast beccause the network really gave you an undefined number of copies, since you could have any number of recording devices in the house. But, if you try real hard to ignore artificial nature of the boundaries, it all kind of makes sense.
There is Shakespeare, actually. You just never read it because it's modded to (-1) offtopic.
I strongly support Napster's right to do what they do, but my support has nothing to do with music.
Napster is simply and only a search engine. It has an advantage over Google in that clients that wish to share files must let Napster know that the files are available. Therefore, it can do a better job as a search engine for a particular type of file because those who wish to share that type of file jump up and down and yell "look at me" until Napster indexes their files.
Other than that, if you examine what Napster does at a programming level, it looks exactly like what Google does, or Altavista, or Yahoo.
Napster is being sued because of the content that it indexes as a search engine. No other search engine has been sued for indexing copyrighted content (that I know of). ISPs have been sued, individuals have been sued, Universities that host files have been sued, but no other search engine has been.
If Napster goes down then a fair application of the law will take down Google, et. al. Of course, there won't be an equal application of law. Can you imagine anyone sueing Google to force Google to block all files that contain references to an ftp site with copyrighted files? I thought not. Neither should Napster be responsible for the content it indexes.
Just for kicks - go to Google and type "pink floyd mp3". You'll be able to download copyrighted material from one of the first ten links. The only redress that record companies have to prevent this is to contact the site that hosts the files and tell them to remove the files or be sued. Google has no liability.
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