Linux going to be big in China 3745

Well, ghost, you need not be a lawyer to appreciate the facts of the matter. Copying is "illegal" and violates the US Code, but is only a criminal matter when the copying is done for commercial resale or the personal use copying exceeds $1000 worth of retail value in any 180 period (1997 No Electronic Theft Amendment to the code). So Gonzales, as a finding of fact, "only" copied 30 tunes, due to a stipulation made by her to the RIAA. Since the criminal code does not apply, what does?

On one hand, there is damage possibly made to the RIAA members in that Gonzales enjoyed the tunes and didn't pay the price. How much is that? If the tune can be purchased, say on iTunes, for 99 cents, that's just 30 cents less than $30 worth of pooching. Now the RIAA would not have received the whole $30, just the wholesale price for the package. I don't know what Apple pays for the tunes it distributes, but they have a very high initial profit margin, so it may only be a dime or so. Now that dime is the revenue that the RIAA might have lost if Gonzales would have purchased the tunes rather than simply doing without.

Instead, she pays $22,500 which is a very high percentage of the money that the RIAA could have "lost" in the best case.

Now it is no skin off the RIAA nose to file the legal action, they have the staff and the budget to do so. They have filed thousands of cases that they are gladly willing to settle for a thousand bucks or so up front and use as a FUD effort against the millions who frequent Kazaa and similar sources of tunes. Is that fair?

I think that there is no "joint and severable" liability involved here, Gonzales is only responsible to pay for what she used, but going to the wall to collect a couple of dollars is a waste of time for the RIAA, so they use the legal system to threaten the unarmed population and thereby align the power of government behind the commercial interests of a distribution system that has become pbuttŽ. With the internet and everyman a potential publisher of literary and musical content, the "labels" are not really needed since there is no need for the equipment and factories as there once was. They are making the law work for them rather than adapting to a changing environment. They are dinosaurs and headed for extinction as such, so they resist.