Music, Computers and Copyright

Unsurprisingly, I disagree that copying music is theft; "intellectual property" is a nonsense concept.When you pay for a CD, you are not paying for the song, you are paying for the medium on which it is written and the cost of delivery, retails space ground rent et al.The artists is in the business of providing content to a publisher. They are not paid for their content directly, they are paid royalties for being in part responsible for a physical product that can be sold. If they were being paid for the actual music creation, they'd be on an hourly wage like anyone else.The reason that copyright is restricted is to prevent a publisher selling their products using someone's music without paying the royalty; but unless you are seeling the music download on, that does not apply to you. You as a consumer do not constitute an abusive publisher. Copyright is not intended to protect the artist from you, but from such publishers. Eventually any given work passes into the public domain and any citizen or publisher has the freedom to print copies withgout paying a royalty.

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But when I rip songs off library CDs, doesn't that make the library an abusive publisher?

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Tehcnically no, becuase the library did not sell the product to you as yours to own.But the library could be legitmately accused of another misdemeanor, which is the pre-emption of a sale. That is, you might have bought the product yourself if the library had not loaned it to you (regardless of whther you copied it though, as it happens).

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Except that libraries must have a specifc defence against such claims otherwise they couldn't even lend out books.

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Yes, it is a special exemption based on the maximum social benefit. There is a coherent argument against it, on much the same basis as that against collective health care. It's interesting that one is a political football, and one is not.

I'm very confident that Microsoft at least used to operate a structure in which you could have multiple installations of software.This was necessary due to the perishable nature of electronic media - you had a right to make a backup. The criteria for illegality then was not multiple copies, but multiple uses. You could install the same version of windows on one machine used at work and another used at home, perfectly legally, becuase only one was in use at a time. Technically, if someone at home used the computer wat home while you were at work, that would be illegal.But again, what all this confusion indicates is that copyright law is based on a pre-infor economy model, an economics of scarcity that simply does not apply any longer.