Re: [ARSCLIST] [78-l] "Isn't 50 years of copyright enough?" (copyright extens...

[Mike Richter <mrichter@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:12 PM 8/19/2004 -0400, James L Wolf wrote:

> Can't argue with this. Certainly the only people making available most
> classic jazz, blues, country, etc. are either operating illegally in the
> US or are importing here from Europe. Funny how the law discriminates
> against small American businesses who want to reissue this stuff, but
> not against European businesses. Perhaps that point could persuade some
> Congress members, but probably not enough.

Sorry, but you appear to have misunderstood.

1. U.S. law applies to activities in the U.S., not to those in other
countries. A Romanian company making recordings for sale in Hong Kong is
violating no law; neither is the recipient. However, it is illegal to
import into the U.S. material which violates U.S. law. Therefore, anyone
buying such a recording from Hong Kong - whether an individual, a retailer
or a distributor - is in violation and is subject to penalty.

Since that sort of thing cannot be policed in practice for individuals or
small shops, it is used to threaten and/or to control wholesale piracy of
this class - promoting thereby another form of piracy, duplicating
commercial recordings legally available in the U.S.

In my opinion, the problem is not localized or subject to patchwork
solution. The concept of protection of intellectual property needs to be
examined from first principles, recognizing the ease of replication and
distribution and that the term "border" has a meaning in most respects
entirely different from that in the dictionary. I believe that it goes
farther than the above in that control of dissemination has moved from the
entities which have the rights to the consumers who select content.

However, discussion of those issues merely wastes 'bandwidth' until an
organization is prepared to take up the sword of logic and the shield of
principle against the corporate behemoth of funding.


Mike
--
mrichter@xxxxxxx
http://www.mrichter.com/