Spring Break
The Daily OrangeCopyright crackdown: Music industry targets college students with lawsuits to stop illegally downloaded music files
Abstract:
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Dana Lukic
posted 4/04/07 @ 11:35 AM EST
I have studied copyright law and my confusion with this whole thing is that today's popular music is played everyday on the radio up to thousands of times a day by different radio stations who are permitted and begged to play these songs by the artists to the public for free. One could easily record these songs each time they are played free of charge. Unlike movies, works of art and other copyrightable material are not voluntarily offered to the public thousands of times a day free of charge! Therefore it seems to me that the Recording Industry of America is simply trying to split hairs by suing people for having slightly better quality copies of songs ( mp3 files) rather than cassette tape copies straight from the radio which provides the songs to the public for free at the request of the artists. This is what appears to me to cause common radio- played songs to loose a valid claim to their copyright protection. These works are already being provided to the public for free everyday on the radio.....
- Displaying 1 - 3 of 3
Michael LeBlanc
posted 3/30/07 @ 1:52 AM EST
If buy a CD at Best Buy, you can go right ahead and download those songs off of the internet, and be fully within your legal rights. People do this all the time for a variety of reasons, including avoiding nasty DRM copy protection on their CD's, their inexperience in ripping CD's, or whatever other reason.
These people are being sued for UPLOADING copyrighted material without a license to do so. Even if I legally bought a CD in a store, ripped it to my computer and then put it in my Limewire shared folder, I would be just as likely a target for these lawsuits as someone who downloaded the song without owning the CD or a license to it.
I think the clarification is important, and people need to be made aware of it.