(December 30, 2013 at 10:46 pm)Clueless Morgan Wrote: So do you consider back in the day when you would put a cassette in your boombox and record your favorite songs off the radio to be pirating? Or recording TV shows onto VHS tapes so you could watch them weeks, months or years later?
What about sites like playlist.com, are those piracy? You're basically just building a playlist that you have to stream through their website, but you never own any of the music.
Even now you can record TV shows onto DVRs and burn them to DVDs if you have the right equipment, is that piracy?
Is it only piracy when you turn around and sell or otherwise make the property available for a mass market?
To be clear, I'm not defending piracy, I'm simply wondering where the line for piracy is now drawn.
Well... It simultaneously is and is not different.
Copyright in the US is supposed to simultaneously protect creator's exclusive rights for a time, and to provide for a rich public domain. It's impossible, IMO, to argue the letter of the constitutional authority hasn't been subverted by Congress (where some works produced early in the last century are still protected).
Time-shifting (I.e. recording on a VCR) is a right protected by some Supreme Court decision I can't recall - as is format shifting (i.e. making a tape recording of a LP).
The recording industry sees digital copies as threatening because there are two factors that exist that do not with analog recordings. One, it's trivial to make a perfect recording of a digital recording - where with analog, you cannot. Second, in the age of the Internet, dissemination of those perfect copies to anyone who wants them is trivially simple, and it is not difficult to understand why the industry would want to discourage such behavior.
Where ought the line be drawn? No idea. It is apparent that Congress is owned by moneyed interests and so it will fall on their side.
