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Administration that "makes available" applies because of an
international law. This is the same argument made by some of
the liberal justices of the Supreme Court in trying to overturn US
law. I believe we are on a slippery slope to losing our rights as a
nation just as we have lost control of our borders.
the law of the land, right? You seem to think that we're giving
something up by some process because of treaties - we're not.
They've always been the law of the land.
certain materials might be illegal and the users are responsible to
any copyright infringement. That's where fair use came in, which
limits which amount of duplication is acceptable. Yet the libraries
make a nice profit with those machines... but we are not seeing
every publisher getting their "fair" share (yet).
Industries can't exploit laws that don't exist.
for media sharing. If you steal $6 work of milk and bread, you
are likely to receive a sentence commensurate with the value of
those products. But if you download a single CD with a retail
value of $13 you may be penalized thousands of dollars.
Reports say that RIAA is trying to convince (i.e., buy) congress
to raise the penalty for copying a multi-artist collection CD to
over $1 million. The penalties for sharing are similarly absurd.
The problem isn't so much the letter of the law as it is the life-
destroying penalties for actions that, in many cases, have very
slight effects. And let us not overlook the new report claiming
that not a penny of the $400 million raised in lawsuits by the
RIAA has been distributed to the artists.
The problem with the milk and bread analogy is that unless you are Jesus of Nazreth, you can't feed millions of people with just a loaf of bread and a carton of milk. Files can be copied ad infinitum.
Which comes back to the problem of how many files were downloaded.
Personally, I think the record companies should stop making and selling recordings, then they would stop losing money from copying and downloading. They'll save it all! What will they do with all that money?
(They just don't get it, do they?)
Now that the Bush administration has gone on record (pun) by supporting international law and treaties, by extension they must accept all the rest.
Geneva Convention, and so on. That'd be an 'oops!'
- by columbia1 May 16, 2008 9:26 PM PDT
- The text of the brief clearly shows that the Bush Administration has never endorsed the making available theory. Rather, it merely notes that it exists in international treaties and that any adverse ruling may affect those treaties, not U.S. law. They may one day make an argument for it, but they have not done so yet. Also, one of the leading making available cases centers on a library that allowed a copyrighted book to remain on its shelves after the copyright owner had complained. The RIAA actually heavily relies on the library analogy to support their making available theory.
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