Re: Copyrights and Wrongs, from The Netly News

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

Congress has voted to make not-for-profit copyright infringments a federal
felony, as I write in my article at:

  http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1588,00.html

A Federal court in _LaMacchia_ noted that: "Since 1897, when criminal
copyright infringement was first introduced into U.S. copyright law, the
concept differentiating criminal from civil copyright violations has been
that the infringement must be pursued for purposes of commercial
exploitation."

This now changes. For the first time in the history of the U.S., nonprofit
(noncommercial) copying is a crime.

When doing research for the story I stumbled across this quote, from the
Supreme Court in Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985):

	...Interference with copyright does not easily equate with
	theft, conversion or fraud. The Copyright Act even
	employs a separate term of art to define one who
	misappropriates a copyright: "Anyone who violates any
	of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner..." [...]
	The infringer invades a statutorily defined province
	guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not
	assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he
	wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may
	colloquially like infringement with some general notion
	of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly
	implicates a more complex set of property interests than
	does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion or fraud.

-Declan



-------------------------
Declan McCullagh
Time Inc.
The Netly News Network
Washington Correspondent
http://netlynews.com/