Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Copyright Law and You

I'm sorry. I really just couldn't think of a better title.

Jeff Rehbach, Midd's very own LIS Policy Adviser, writes in to share this article from the New York Times, File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Restraints.

The article highlights students, like you and me, who have paid out some pretty large sums (i.e. $3,000) for illegal file-sharing. Ouch. That's roughly 2/3 of my yearly income. One such student, Zachary McCune, started Brown's chapter of Students for Free Culture.

Jeff asks, "There are ways to share files safely and legally, so why do people take the risk?" You know the drill. Hit the comments. Do you download files legally or illegally? (No worries-- this isn't some sort of sting operation.) What do you think about U.S. copyright laws? Have some of them gotten out of hand?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is it too much to ask for MiddBlog to use live links instead of me having to copy and paste in your links into my browser every time? Ok, I'm lazy but really...

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I second that. Real links please!

Sarah said...

Sorry, kids, I was writing from a computer that only had Safari; the Blogger platform dislikes Safari and does not provide hyperlinks as an option. I'll change them to hyperlinks in just a moment. If you'll notice, all of the the other links on MiddBlog are live.

Unknown said...

itunes just dropped the price of its drm-free tracks to 99 cents, same as the encrypted tracks. seems like it won't be long till the whole store is drm-free. copyright protection is apparently going out of fashion.

on the books...