I hate to be nit-picky here, but can anyone articulate the difference between pirating an mp3 and printing this poster (copyrighted by Modern Humorist) from an image off the internet?


Now consider the fact that downloading this page created an unauthori[s|z]ed copy of said copyrighted works in your computer's cache! You are guilty as charged

But since you asked: (And I preface this with IANAL)


In context of this subject - printing this poster for your own personal use would be illegal, unless you had already paid for a copy somehow. No doubts about that.

However, selling an empeg with 96GB of music on it would not strictly speaking be illegal - as long as the following held:
1) No percentage of the sale price could be attributed to the music. ie the seller sold the empeg and not the music.
2) The seller had the legal right to create the backup copy on the empeg in the first place (ie owned the CD or tape)
3) The seller did not put the music on the empeg just for the purpose of selling the empeg.
4) The seller did not know that the buyer had a specific intent to obtain the copyrighted material without paying royalties. (Actually I'm not sure if this one really matters or not..)

or
1) The seller was also including the original CDs/tapes in the sale.

AFAIK, there is no legal *requirement* for a storage medium to be cleansed of copyrighted material when it is sold - and as the buyer did not create the copy in the first place, he could not be held liable either. [edit: typo - I forgot the 'not']

But morally, and ethically, the situation is far different. I don't think that Modern Humorist are really going to care much about you or I printing a low-res image of a single image, just as I don't think that the RIAA really care about people downloading a single MP3. And I think that the public would agree with that sentiment. But printing hundreds of posters to sell, or knowingly providing someone with 96GB of copyrighted material that you suspect that they keep and use, is both morally and ethically wrong. And I think that the general public would agree there too. (Well, those who are out of their teens anyway).

And since this poster appears to be out of print, ie non-attainable from the copyright owners, I would have no moral or ethical qualms about printing it. And I feel the same way about music too - if an album is out of print, and I have made a good faith effort to obtain a legally licensed new copy, then it's open season as far as I'm concerned. Why??

The oringinal intention of copyright law was to increase the public wealth of knowledge and art. Not to enrichen artists. To encourage the creators to publish their works, the state granted a limited monopoly on their works in which time the copyright owner was compensated for each copy made. But the whole purpose was to make the works available.

What we see today is a complete travesty - the 'limited' monopoly is so long as to be farcical, and availability seems to be at the whim of the publisher - "Buy Disney's <insert title here> on video NOW before it gets locked away in the vault for another 10 years..." ("Cinderella" IIRC). This was not the intention of the founders of copyright law, and as far as I'm concerned is morally and ethically disgraceful.

And the music industry is no better with their back catalog either. With their resources, they should have been able to make the vast majority of their out of print music easily available to consumers - either as mp3 downloads or by 'burn-in-store', or 'burn-to-mail-order' technology, but they haven't.

Instead they have pointlessly invested in lawyers to try and kill the technology, in marketing propaganda to convince us that using our empegs is somehow bad, in political donations to try and make our empegs and any other computing device without DRM illegal, and in download services where you lose the right to listen to music you've downloaded unless you keep a subscription current. So I'm really not going to lose too much sleep about obtaining an unlicensed copy of something that they can't be bothered to keep available.

Hmm..I ranted a bit. Time to breathe.