gatordev said:Yup, copy all on the Torrents, and I'm a big proponent of them. I think you can still hold a tape recorder to your stereo, legally. But digitally recording the same song gets sticky. Should it be different if you paid for the song? There's the big debate. One huge issue I have w/ the DMCA is that it makes downloading independently recorded broadcast TV technically illegal. There's a multitude of reasons why that's stupid.
The laws on copying music, video, etc get very screwed up with regard to fair use law. It is perfectly acceptable to photocopy pages from a book for your OWN personal use, i.e. not for reproduction, etc. Yet somehow it's illegal to copy a digital stream from say a streaming radio station. There is way too much slack going on there and the courts need to make up their minds.
I remember when the CSS (I think that's what it was called) code came out to allow for open source DVD software (ala Unix/Linux). There was all sorts of free speech issues and whatnot and the courts decided that software code was a form of expressive speech. Wierd. The digital arena makes things a whole other game.