Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- As part of an uphill battle against Internet movie piracy, entertainment industry lobbyist Jack Valenti offered university students a lesson in morality Tuesday. "Too many students don't believe it's wrong to steal these movies," Valenti told students at Georgetown University Law Center. "It is fracturing the moral contract to take something that does not belong to you." The appearance was one of several that the president of the Motion Picture Association of America plans at prominent universities over the next few months. Students are among the heaviest online traffickers of illegally copied material. Since the late 1990s, a...

European copyright protection is expiring on a collector's trove of 1950's jazz, opera and early rock 'n' roll albums, forcing major American record companies to consider deals with bootleg labels and demand new customs barriers. Already reeling from a stagnant economy and the illegal but widespread downloading of copyrighted music from the Internet, the recording companies will now face a perfectly legal influx of European recordings of popular works. Copyright protection lasts only 50 years in Europe compared to 95 years in the United States, even if the recordings were originally made and released in America. So recordings made in...

<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) — U.S. lawmakers have asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to go after Internet users who download unauthorized songs and other copyrighted material, raising the possibility of jail time for digital-music fans.</p> <p>In a July 25 letter released late Thursday, some 19 lawmakers from both sides of the aisle asked Ashcroft to prosecute "peer-to-peer" networks like Kazaa and Morpheus and the users who swap digital songs, video clips and other files without permission from artists or their record labels.</p>