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Problem I see with dropping the "Copy" part of copyright

Problem I see with dropping the "Copy" part of copyright

Posted Sep 29, 2005 13:04 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
In reply to: Problem I see with dropping the "Copy" part of copyright by khim
Parent article: The Authors' Guild and Google Print

Looks perfectly reasonable to me and this is how normal people are viewing copyright anyway: noone who's not paid by madia companies think it's illegal to copy from legally bought audio-CD to your MP3 player.

Note that what normal people think is perfectly reasonable is not unfortunately the same as what copyright law currently says. In this case I think you may be right (thanks to the home recording act). Replace audio CD by a piece of software, and you may not be. (See Mai Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc.)

But I agree, it would be great to draw the line at distribution instead of copying. That seems like a very sensible balance.


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