It has always amazed me that the central core of the entertainment
industry's problem with the consumer making copies was the technology used,
not the right to do it. The "Fair Use" doctrine essentially allowed us as
consumers a license to make copies of anything we had paid for as long as
the end use of the copy was our own consumer use. The recording industry
didn't like it, but allowed the doctrine to exist in federal legislation as
long as the copies we made were guaranteed to be inferior in some way to the
"original" we had purchased. The doctrine was viewed as being a right, that
we, as consumers, had.
Once analog-to-digital transfer became a reality and digital devices could
bitstream creating digital-to-digital transfer, the entertainment industry
began to get nervous and began its attack on the fair use doctrine. Music
is music, whether on 78 r.p.m. shellac or CD. My point, if there is one, is
why does our right depend on the technology? It is our right as consumers,
not the entertainment industry's as producer, that was protected under the
doctrine.
Yet, we (Congress) gave it away:(((.
Jamie
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