karn (04/16/83)
It would seem to me that if the record companies would stop wringing their hands about piracy and trying to tax blank tape, and instead welcomed the digital disk systems with open arms, they might actually begin solve their problem in a reasonable and enlightened way. They could compete with private copying, which is about as easy to stop through legislation as fornication, by providing a superior product that is not as easily duplicated. Of course, that will be until I perfect my cheap CD-disk-to-video-recorder copying interface... While I am not a lawyer, I was always under the impression that a copyright gives you protection against only one thing: COPYING. Lending or selling the record to someone else isn't copying. If the seller wants to keep you from doing that, he has to retain rights to the copy and make you sign a license agreement, as is done now with proprietary software. Otherwise, all copyrights are created equal (assuming you deposit the copies and all that stuff), despite any shrill warnings to the contrary. Phil Karn