Whether or not you believe this to be theft, an increasing number of our public officials believe it to be so. And they will continue to believe it is so because they get more money from big business than from MP3 pirates.
What will happen is that government will be coerced or cajoled by the music industry into forcing computer manufacturers and ISPs to make it difficult to trade illegal files.
This will lead to more and more intrusive hardware and spyware that the average user will be required to install in order to continue to have full access to the internet.
This will also lead to more global rather than national or local rules which is inherently creepy.
There will always be ways to hack around whatever they legislate, but more and more people will be spied on and regimented to counter piracy.
Of course, pirates will continue to pirate, so an internet clusterf**k is inevitable.
Whether or not you believe this to be theft, an increasing number of our public officials believe it to be so.
* * * * ** **** * * * *
Just because a politician is getting campaign contributions to believe something does not make it so. It was popular to make flag burning illegal but it still did not stand muster. From what I have heard of politicians speaking, non of them really have a serious clue about the subtlties of copyright law.
The question has to be what are you protecting? If the goal is to protect the distribution then you protect the labels. If the real issue is protecting the musicians then the issue is protecting the songs. The comment made above really zero's in on the issue. Why does the DVD of a movie sell for less than the soundtrack.
Abroad Kazaa and I believe the kidd who cracked the DVD code have won in those courts. There has been no case to test the DMCA (or whatever the letters are) in fact the RIAA seems to back down before they really challenge the law or they go after powerless individuals. In this case, what resources are these students going to have access to?