Copyright Laws, etc.

[mithril]

Maybe it should be legal but it's not, so no matter if the reproduction of the "car" is made by a 3rd party for no cost or not, the 3rd party has no right to distribute it.

Back to Baker's orginal statmenet - you paid for a license to listen to your physical copy of the CD, not someone else's reproduced copy. Buying the CD gives you the right to listen to it... reproducing it and making it available to anyone else is a violation of the license. Thus when you go to get a reproduction of it online, the copy itself is in violation of the license so you are too by getting it.

Sole is probably right in saying that under current copyright laws its not legal to get 3rd party copies of music/software that you have already purchased. But the bigger issue that I think Baker was getting at is what is morally right, ie: what will benefit society as a whole more.

Richard Stallman (the founder of the GNU movement) has written many essays on this topic (www.gnu.org/philosophy) and I happen to agree mostly with his views. Here are some relevant quotes from the essay "Why Software Should Not Have Owners"

The copyright system grew up with printing---a technology for mass production copying. Copyright fit in well with this technology because it restricted only the mass producers of copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and few readers were sued for that.

Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That's the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright.

and

What does society need? It needs information that is truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what software owners typically deliver is a black box that we can't study or change.

Society also needs freedom. When a program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part of their own lives.

And above all society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary cooperation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is ``piracy'', they pollute our society's civic spirit.

So the car analogy doesn't really apply, since its much more difficult to produce an identical copy of a car than it is to get an identical copy of a song or some software. The way I see it is if you pay your hard earned dollars for a piece of software, you are entitled to know exactly what that software is doing on your computer and should have the freedom to modify it and distribute your modifications. Having those freedoms basically means that the software can't have an "owner". And for music, I think the same reasoning applies, after all, music is the creation of some artist just as software is the creation of some programmer. If you buy a digital copy of a song, shouldn't you have the right to modify it in any way you want and redistribute it? Should music have an owner? Under the current system the artist who writes the song doesn't even own it anymore since they sign over all rights to it to whatever record label they sign with.