[Fmpro] P2P "Piracy" - is it?

[JJB]

The whole idea that filesharing is Piracy is still somewhat debatable. 
The DMC act and the Sony-Betamax court decision indicated that it might 
be completely legal to share music with anyone you wanted to. It was 
only in fairly recent court decisions (in many cases by technologically 
unsophisticated judges) that the laws were interpreted to mean that 
filesharing of copyrighted music was illegal. Initially, companies like 
Napster believed they had the legal right to provide the file sharing 
service and their users had the right to share any music they had 
purchased with anyone they wanted, just like you could take a video or 
song that you liked, make tapes of it and share it with your friends.

I put quotes around piracy because the knee jerk reaction to filesharing 
was to call it piracy, when at the time there was quite a bit of 
consensus that it was perfectly legal to do so - the laws allowing you 
to share music and video being written before digital filesharing became 
a commonplace reality.  Legal decisions now have created some precedent 
for it being illegal, but that was not the case until fairly recently. 
(mp3.com bet its future on the legality of being able to copy any music 
you owned and listen to the music that you owned using their service - 
and lost.)

 - Joel