Fair Usage != Piracy (Score 1)

I personally think Palladium is a Very Bad Thing (tm). A platform which allows one company to control the vast majority of personal computers in use worldwide, thanks to its defacto market monopoly, raises privacy and antitrust issues that (almost) give me nightmares.

BUT

I'm not entirely sure what the UK stance is on fair usage as far as copyright law goes. IANAL, but I understand it to be something along the lines of "If you have a CD, you want to listen to it in your tape-only walkman, you can make a copy to listen to it." or whatever. I don't see how allowing tens of thousands of other people to have a copy of someone's copyright music over P2P is fair usage. It isn't.

I admit, I too download illegal copies of music using kazaa, gnutella, etc, etc. It's nice - I get lots of music, I don't have to pay lots of money. It isn't entirely fair on the copyright holders, who weren't expecting one album sale to cover 10,000 end users. If they choose to let people share the content, fair enough. If they don't choose to do this, they shouldn't have to.

A lot of people of /. talk about enforcing copyright law in the same kind of terms as those used to describe Hitler's Endlosung final solution. The basic idea of copyright law is that if you create something, YOU own it. If you let someone listen to your music, it doesn't mean they can pass it on to other people. These laws have allowed authors, musicians, and many other artists live above the poverty line. Just because record companies, publishers and the like get a large amount of money, doesn't mean copyright law can be ignored.

Knowledge is different.