Avril, Ladies back Nettwerk's offer to fight downloading lawsuit - Yahoo! News

Avril, Ladies back Nettwerk's offer to fight downloading lawsuit - Yahoo! News

As a student of copyright law, and student might be a misnomer, I particularly like the comments of Jon Newton of p2pnet.net. Very early when one is examining the history of copyright law, the reason for its being was to prevent professionals from stealing from other professionals ie. commercial competition.

While final consumers can now replicate works, it is not for a commercial purpose such works are being replicated.

Now of course one can argue as they will in Canada that the uploading, making available right, is not in the realm of the consumer to make, and the act of uploading would be illegal but is sharing files "uploading" technically, or in spirit.

The fact of the matter is that I don't encourage anyone to share their music files, it does not mean that if they are shared I would not sample them, and if I liked what I heard, buy the real deal.

The promotional aspect of filesharing is not well argued publicly yet in one study 3/4 of the artists benefited from filesharing. The more accomplished 1/4 did not. A classic rich vs. poor dichotomy and in some measure a case of cutting the ropes for those seeking to climb them by those first up.

A better solution to cutting the ropes, is a collective licensing measure but then others will argue they don't want to pay twice for the actions of the free riders.

Much more on this to come.