As one lawyer to another, please, please STOP with the disclaimers whenever you write an article that touches on a news item that may contain the words "legal" "court" or "lawyers". There is no legal advice in this posting or, indeed, any of your other posts.

This is just pathetic (and oh-so American).

Is it me or does that look like a bong (without zooming the pic)?

It seems there is a little confusion as to the operation of intellectual property laws and rights in and to the intellectual property concerned. I hope this note, written on the basis of the rightsholder vs. the consumer, is a helpful clarification:-

Content, whether it be music, video etc. is licensed to the consumer. Consumers never "own" that content, per se.

However, consumers will (depending on the intellectual property laws of their country) have: (i) an IRREVOCABLE licence to use that content; and (ii) the right and title (i.e. ownership) of the media (if any) on which that content was purchased.

Previously, and in most countries with sane intellectual property laws, consumers were also guaranteed, in law, a right of "fair use" in relation to that content.

Generally speaking, "fair use" can be said to be the right to make a tape of a record purchased or the right to quote extracts from a book in a college essay, for example. This was the status quo until the digital age. (It should also be noted that in most jurisdictions, breaches of intellectual property rights were a civil offence, not a criminal one. In other words, the rights holder could sue for infringement but a court could not generally fine or imprision an infringer.)

In the digital age it became easy to quickly and cheaply make perfect copies of content and to distribute that content to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Rights holders (i.e. the record labels/music studios etc.) didn't like this development. They took a strong approach to implementing DRM and lobied leglislators to enact legislation such as the DMCA, but not to amend or revoke the laws relating to fair use.

This created the following situation: digital content was now 'locked' down by DRM, the DMCA (or the like) made breaking the DRM (or even discussing the breaking the DRM in some cases) a criminal offence. Fair use rights in relation to digital content are now almost impossible to invoke in relation to DRM protected content without committing a criminal offence.

But now it looks like the tide is turning and rightholders are more willing to work with and for consumers, rather than against them and are reconsidering their stance on DRM.

This has already happened in the MP3 arena, largely due to the phenominal sucess of the iPod and other devices, with rightsholders abandoning DRM on CDs.

My stance is that this is a good, sensible, move. The real problem is the commercial pirates running the duplicating factories which are churning out millions of counterfeit CDs and DVDs.