Originally posted by TurboSmoke
in my local super market they cell CD-Rs....right above it there is a legal notice saying that copying music and software is an offence..etc...
why sell them?
Because it is
up to the individual to make sure their own actions are legal and ethical.
There is nothing illegal about
owning mp3s. What's illegal is
stealing them. You're perfectly within your rights to buy a CD and rip a copy for your own use. I do it all the time by taking my bought CDs to work, copying them to my hard drive, and listening to them that way while the CD returns safe at home.
But I don't give them away or burn copies for people. It's really not that hard a concept to grasp.
Your car is capable of violating the speed limit. By an extension of your train of thought, your car should not have been sold in a way that was capable of going faster than the legal limit. The government should have relieved you of the responsibility of deciding what speed to drive by mandating that no car should be physically capable of exceeding the national limit.
Also, a lot of you who like to whine about Metallica and how they killed Napster need to understand a little bit about copyright law:
Metallica, and in fact
all artists
must pursue legal action against priacy, or they are in real danger of losing ownership of their creations.
If known piracy continues and is not challenged by legal action for a certain period of time,
the law assumes that the original copyright owner is abandoning their rights to the material, and the material passes into the public domain. So unless Metallica sues Napster and its users to make them stop violating the copyright, the copyright becomes void and Metallica loses their ownership of their own music.
It's far more involved than the simple question of Metallica being greedy. We'll leave the whole moral issue of theft out of it as well. There are very real, legal reasons that put Metallica perfectly in the right.
).
