"I fail to see any real difference between loading files from the internet and copying them off the air from your radio. I mean, a hundred dollar radio. a patch cable and a copy of cooledit or something and you can make your own mp3 files off the fricking air. They gonna start charging us for owning radios?"
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It's OK to copy a song off the radio via air. What the RIAA is bitching about is that private citizens don't have the rights to distribute the music.
It is not the copying that they are going after, it's the people involved in the distribution.
I am wholeheartedly against the US copyright laws that allow an effectively infinite timespan to own a work. Patents only allow 17 or 20 years, which should also be enough time for a song to sell a bundle for their creator. This would drive the really talented people to work harder instead of sitting on a song's royalties forever.
I agree. Hank Williams senior has been dead for over fifty years. Nobody associated with Williams creation of those songs is still alive. The people making money off of them now are suits who had nothing to do with the creation of the work.
After a period of time, artwork becomes part of the cultural fabric. Huckleberry Finn, A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island, The Jungle Books are all public domain, now, which is as it should be. The same thing should happen with music.
Now the Indians are dressing up like Cowboys
And the Cowboys are putting leather and turquoise on
And the music is sold by lawyers,
and the fools who fiddle in the middle of the station are gone.
Do they sue radio station owners for broadcasting the songs over the air where people might record them? No. They spend millions of dollars every year promoting that activity.
It's just nuts. The technology is different, but the actual activity is the same.