News Copying is Theft - and other legal myths

An useful read, courtesy of the The Register:

Opinion As the war over P2P downloading heats up, and the record companies launch the novel marketing technique of suing their customers, I think it is an appropriate time to settle some of the pervasive myths about U.S. copyright law which fuel both sides of the debate, writes Mark Rasch, SecurityFocus columnist and former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit.

The current state of the battleground is that the RIAA, having lost a lawsuit against Kazaa, Morpheus and others for copyright infringement, and having won a lawsuit against Verizon, is actively pursuing subpoenas against various ISPs to force them to pony up the names and addresses of the uploaders and downloaders themselves.

Several universities have invoked a federal law aimed at preventing the release of student academic records (and significantly narrowed by both the USA-PATRIOT Act and the U.S. Supreme Court last year) to refuse to provide information on their students' downloading activities to the RIAA. Meanwhile, the P2P providers, large and small, in an effort to provide "customer service," are utilizing a variety of anonymizing techniques -- including proxy servers, encryption, and various UDP ports -- to help prevent the RIAA from successfully subpoenaing these records. Undaunted, the RIAA has vowed a full-scale assault -- even against those who share a single copyrighted song.

All of these battles are against the backdrop of U.S. copyright law, which provides some protection to the "author" of an original work that is fixed in any tangible medium of expression. But there seems to be a great deal of confusion about the scope of protection under this law.

The U.S. Constitution permits Congress "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Under intensive lobbying by the movie, publishing and recording industries, Congress has nudged that "limited" time from the original 17 years in 1789, to the publisher's life plus 75 years today -- a time limit that the U.S. Supreme Court recently approved.

For this "limited" time, Copyright law essentially grants the author the exclusive rights to copy or reproduce the work, make derivative works, distribute copies of the work (sell, give away, lease or license), and to perform the work, and, of course, to keep others from doing the same.

Simple enough? Not hardly.

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