Actually, you're 100% right. I think I was trying to decide between the phrase "content cartel" and "copyright maximalists", so my aging brain settled on "content maximalists". Would you change that to "copyright maximalists" for me, please :)

It means the big old school content "gatekeeper" companies, and their trade groups like the MPAA, RIAA, ASCAP, etc., whose economic power is being eroded by digitalization and the internet, and who are fighting back by taking extremist positions in defense of their copyright ownership.

Oops, I forgot to put "(PDF)" after the link to the Judge's 24 page decision, which is indeed a PDF file. I always like to give that heads-up, but forgot to this time.

There's a theater at the Tower of the Americas in San Antonio that does this with a little 30-minute show about Texas. I took my kids to it. The 3-D gave me a headache. And there was a part where a big bull snorts and it sprays a bit of water in your face, which was just gross and off-putting. And the smells all smelled like artificial scents out of a Glade air freshener (which is more or less what they are). And the hallway outside of the theater stunk from leftover artificial smells. And despite the advertisement that it would be "4-D," there was no actual time travel, except for shifting me forward in time about 30 minutes so that I was about 30 minutes and about $30 poorer. And get off my lawn.

Yes.

If it's "sold," then certainly you can sell the physical disk on which the authorized copy you received resides. The right to make an additional copy is not necessary to re-sell. It just makes re-selling more convenient to you, and unless and until there is a copyright exception for this, it's a violation. Maybe the law would be better if it permitted copying to re-sell, but that's not the way it is now, and I'm not sure it would be better that way anyway. A primary feature of "reselling" is that the original owner gives up the goods he is reselling. That's hard to police without very strong DRM, which I'm pretty sure Slashdotters adamantly oppose. As Slashdotters are fond of parroting, digital is a new world that needs new rules. If you want DRM-free media, giving up resell rights may be the cost. I personally think it's a fair tradeoff. Give me inexpensive, easily-accessible and unencumbered media that I can use without hassle (like plain MP3s at 256k for $0.99 to $1.29), and I'm willing to give up the right to resell them. On the other hand, I don't buy digital books because I want a physical thing on my shelf that I can pass on to my children if I choose. So for me at least, the tradeoff isn't worth it for books.

Yes, unless an exception applies. Moving it to a portable device is now a pretty well-established exception, but it wasn't always so.

No, "Copyright" was the name assigned to the exclusive right to copy. Please read 17 U.S.C. 106. The very first exclusive right enumerated is the exclusive right to make copies. Distribution is third. At its core, copyright is about copying. I'm not sure how serious to take the rest of your comments when you have this fundamental misunderstanding of the underpinnings of copyright law.

All of those copies were authorized by the copyright holder. Once a copy is delivered to you, you are not authorized to make additional copies.

Sure, if you sell the physical disk that the MP3 was originally delivered to. But if you make a copy from that disk to another disk, you have copied without authorization. It's the same as if I buy sheet music. I can sell that sheet music if I want, but I'm not entitled to photocopy it and deliver the photocopy to another person, even if I destroy the original. There are some exceptions like fair use, which is why libraries have copiers, but the baseline rule of copyright is that you cannot make any copies without authorization.

You're thinking of 17 U.S.C. 117(a), which I already mentioned. It's limited to computer programs. And I don't see how making a copy to sell to other people is "required for the use of the work."

I haven't read the decision, but I can see a clear distinction between an MP3 and a CD. Copyright law is all about the act of copying something. Under copyright law, even loading a program into RAM from a disk constitutes "copying" (there is a special statutory exception that explicitly allows this if you are the legitimate owner of a copy of a program). The problem with MP3s is that you can't re-sell them without copying them, unless you purchased a physical disk of MP3s or something, in which case you could resell that disk.

In other words, whether or not you agree with current copyright laws, I believe the judge made the right decision under the laws as they exist. First sale applies to a physical object, but can't apply to digital stuff because reselling digital stuff necessarily requires making a copy.

Actually, no, because that's what they call a rhino in the Bible too.

I don't see any problem with this. It's just dividing a big event we call "creation" into a discrete set of tasks, like you would do if you were writing:

World Create(ingredient matter, ingredient energy, String name)
{
LetThereBeLight();
Divide(light, darkness);
Gather(waters, dry_land);
BringForth(plants); Create(animals);
Create(man);
... (and so on)

I am a devoutly religious person. But I don't confuse the Bible with a science textbook. A person can believe the Bible without believing that it contains a detailed blueprint of the Universe. If God is a God of truth, then scientific investigation---which is a search for truth---bring us closer to him, not farther away. Science is only a problem for people who believe that the Bible contains all the truth that there ever is or will be; that if something is not explicitly in the Bible it must be false. I am not one of those people. I accept the Bible for what it claims to be: a testament of Christ that is more focused on our relationship with God than with specifically how we got zebras. I do not believe that God wants his children to be idiots. He wants us to explore the world around us and see all the cool stuff there is to figure out. If he spoon fed us every detail through religious texts, we wouldn't learn anything, just like you don't learn algebra by copying answers out of the teacher's manual.

I have never seen a unicorn. I will happily admit to that. But it would take a huge leap of faith for me to affirmatively deny that a horse-like creature with a horn on its head has ever existed here or anywhere else in the universe. The best I can say about unicorns is I don't know. Much less would I form an entire secular religion around the fact that I have never seen a unicorn and therefore affirmatively deny their existence.