Copyright Talk

Copyright. The concept is pretty simple – copyright provides a territorial claim to intellectual property (creative ideas set down in a fixed medium) that allows the creator to profit from the creation.
In practice, it’s a tough concept for people to grasp. The difference between owning an item, and owning what the item contains, is a difficult concept to grasp. Some of the difficulty is due to the new technologies that make reproduction of some things simpler than snapping your fingers. But most of the difficulty is really due to the fact that the distinction between owning an object that you can do anything with, and owning what the object contains, that you have no right to do anything with, is a darn difficult distinction to make.
To illustrate, let’s take a basic music CD. When you purchase that CD at a music store, you own the CD and you have the right to play it for yourself, your family and friends. You can loan the CD to anyone you want. You can give the CD away to anyone you want, even a resale store like Goodwill. You can also sell the CD to someone else. All of these things are perfectly legal and expected under the copyright law.
But suppose you decide that rather than loan the CD to a friend, you will simply burn a copy, because you want to continue listening to the CD but you want your friend to hear it also. That is not legal, because even though you own the physical disc, and you (presumably) own the second, blank disc that you burn the music onto, you do not own the right to create new products containing the music itself. When you create a new copy of the music for your own use, there is some argument that you are still within the rights that you bought to the music. But if you are creating new copies of the music for others to use simultaneously to yourself, then you have overstepped your legal rights.
Digital music is more complicated, because there is no physical product to help us distinguish between what we own and what we don’t own. When you “own” an mp3, you move it around all the time
The dilemma for copyright owners is to determine the best way to respond to this, or whether to respond at all. Clearly, if the things that people are doing with their digital music purchases are circumventing sales that the copyright owners were previously making, then the copyright holders have a problem and complaint. But if the uses are new uses that would never have resulted in sales in the first place - that is, I’m happy to have a copy of the song but if it weren’t free I would never have bothered to buy it - does it really infringe anything in a meaningful way?

That’s really the question.