From the unsurprising comments file

Fantastically wrongheaded ideas on intellectual property? Must be a representative of the RIAA*. On Newshour’s Copyright Conundrum, Matt Oppenheim speaks:

Intellectual property should not be treated any differently than other property.

The US Constitution says different.

From an ethical perspective, when individuals engage in illegal copying, they are taking money out of the pockets of all of the people who have put their hard work into making the music.

This makes no sense. From an “ethical perspective [] they are taking money”? Meaningless. Either you are actually taking money, or not. There’s no perspective involved. Flailing appeals to ethics don’t make the RIAA‘s case that downloading equals lost sales any stronger on the facts.

The DMCA Anti-Circumvention provision is not intended to stifle technological innovation. Indeed, it is intended to spur it on by creating and protecting business markets for new technologies.

The DMCA is all about stifling technology in defense of established markets. To suggest that somehow restricting research into cryptography will “spur” innovation in cryptography is ridiculous.

No, [it is not legal to make and distribute (not for personal profit), to my friends and non-commercially, “mix CDs” that contain compilations of music from my personal collection?]

Wow—mix tapes are illegal? No, wait—mix tapes are legal, but mix CDs are not! Whatever.

Just as you would not go into a video store and steal a DVD copy of Star Wars and claim that you should be permitted to do that because you own the VHS version, you cannot download somebody else’s copy of a recording.

For the last time—well, no. It won’t be the last time. So, again: physical property can be stolen in this way. Intellectual property can not. You can’t steal a DiVX of Star Wars the way you can steal a DVD of Star Wars, because when you take a copy of the DiVX, the original DiVX remains. Isn’t that the whole basis of the RIAA‘s contention that digital copies are worse than regular copies? You can’t have it both ways: either a digital copy is an object that you can steal, or a digital copy is a spooky computer ghost thingy that can be infinitely replicated without the original being removed,—and therefore, can’t be stolen. Pick one.

To date, nobody has suggested that copy control technologies have locked up a work that should be in the public domain.

Because nothing is going to enter the public domain again until 2019, maybe?

* Or the MPAA. Wouldn't want to appear to discriminate.

Filed under: copyright