ShaggyJebus wrote...
We all know that downloading Jay-Z's new single off of Limewire is illegal. It's common sense. But I can legally listen to the song (and watch the video) on YouTube. What if I use a program to rip the music from the video? Have I illegally obtained the song? What if I use a tape recorder to record the song from the video? (I hold it up to the speakers while the video's playing.) Is that illegal?
yes
Copyright laws should exist. Work should be protected, in some way. But the current laws don't specify what is and what isn't legal. i guess they never really did. If I recorded songs off of the radio and made a mixtape in 1995, was I breaking the law?
Yes.
The spirit of copyright law is "like a book."
Basically, a book can be read out loud. You can memorize it. But you cannot put it down on a physical medium. You cannot photocopy it. You cannot memorize it then write it down. Once you do, that physical medium can exist in a seperate area from the original book. Obviously, a single book cannot exist at 2 places at the same time, and so copyright is violated.
Youtube is played from their servers. The copy exists in their servers. In fact, Youtube makes it deliberately hard to make copies of their files so that people can't claim "well its on my pc's temp folder, so that already violates copyright!" The only time you can actually watch a youtube video without being hooked to their servers is if you take deliberate steps to copy the video and save it on your hard disk.
Another odd thing I came across - people selling mp3s that they had bought from iTunes or wherever. Pretty much, I buy a song for $0.99, and a month later, I sell it to you for $0.50. I give it to you on a USB drive, I suppose, or send it through email. That sounds fine, but it's easy to right-click a music file, select "Copy," and then "Paste" it in a different folder on your computer. You would be selling a song you bought while also keeping the song. Again, I suppose you could have done this in the past - ripping a CD then selling it to a store that sells used CDs. Is that illegal?
Yes, and how. Unless the person was a licensed distributor, in which case they paid the licensing fee (which is a hell of a lot more than what normal people would pay for a song).
Is that really any different from copying a CD and giving it to a friend, which is technically illegal? Oh yeah, there is one difference: When you do it for a friend, you don't get any money, but when you sell it to a store, you do. So it's not illegal when money's involved?
It's worse. Some violations of copyright can be avoided by claiming fair use (for example, using songs for educational purposes;' this also adresses Trily's question above -- parody falls under fair use). However, it's very hard to get way with fair use if you're making money off of it.
Note that RIAA is retarded and has gone after kids using kids songs for school.
Anyways, getting back to the point, how should copyright laws work in this digital age?
See my discussion above. A song cannot exist in a seperate physical medium.