Shyrell Melara <shyrellmelara@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Bob Maxey" <written_by@xxxxxxx> > Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 16:53:14 -0600 > > > > and by no means is the web a place to find music, pictures, and > > prose completely free for the taking. > > What is the difference between file share and making a tape of your > favorite music and giving it to your friend as a gift? You're not > making money that belongs to the originator. No, I'm not dumb. Just > looking for some comments. We need to separate the law and "what we think the law should be" and still a third thing, "what we think is *right*" (I don't think the law should try to ban absolutely everything that isn't perfectly righteous; sometimes there's too much collateral damage.) I'm talking solely about the last, what *I* think is "right", in the next three paragraphs. Often in terms of relative benefit rather than absolute and simple "yes" and "no". I see two important differences between making a file available publicly in a file-sharing network and making a tape (or CD) to hand to a friend. Number one, making a tape to hand to a friend is me pushing something on them that they probably weren't actively looking for previously, whereas on a file-sharing network the other guy has to go out looking for the work. It's not crazy to argue that my pushing an artist/work on a friend is much more likely to result in future sales for the artist than somebody going out looking for it on file-share. Or, to put it another way, if somebody is actively looking for the work, it seems somewhat likely that he might be an actual possible customer, that an actual sale might be lost when he finds the work on a file-share network. Number two, my pushing mix tapes on friends is much smaller-scale and more manual than making the file available to anybody in the whole world who looks for it. Thus my decision to make the mix tape seems to have much smaller consequences for the overall financial picture of that work. In current legal terms, they seem to me equally illegal, but I'm not a lawyer. And I don't consider the current laws automatically definitive on what's "right", of course (does anybody?). I think a lot of the recent movement in copyright law, to extend terms and restrict more and more what rights people have with a copy of something they have purchased, are bad public policy, not to the overall benefit of society and not to the benefit of the creative people who actually produce works of art (in addition to photographers, I know many authors including the one I'm married to, and quite a few musicians), but only to the benefits of corporations holding old rights. Note that I have avoided saying what I think the law "should" be; I don't think I have any good clean magic solution. As one point, I'd like to greatly cut back the term of copyright, at the very least back to the previous-world-standard of life+50, but I'd really prefer to cut it back further to say life+25. Or I can see lots of arguments for a complete revamp of the system along completely different principles, but revolutionary change is always extremely disruptive and controversial; and I don't have a particular revolutionary idea driving me. -- David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:dd-b@xxxxxxxx>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/> RKBA: <http://noguns-nomoney.com/> <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/> Pics: <http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/> <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/> Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/>
