Quote

Actually, attorneys say, copying a purchased CD for even one friend violates the federal copyright code most of the time.

Given that you'll never be able to prevent copying, the question is, what can you do to minimize it? What can you do to make consumers happy enough with legitimate use of the system that they'll be willing to pay for it?

Megaupload is not responsible for the piracy problem. It's the old business model of Hollywood that is responsible for it, and they want to keep that model alive at any cost.

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it's very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

I'm not sure why anybody makes a physical CD anymore when the costs are so much lower to just throw it up on iTunes. And it doesn't seem that making a hard copy of something prevents pirating any less. I mean I'm amazed that they still do that.

I think it does Discworld good if I don't write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve.

Even if there were no illegal copying, the advent of digital distribution will put a lot of stress on the movie and music industry. When the distribution costs comes down, that puts more price pressure on the rest of the cost.

Online piracy needs to be dealt with itself, because people are just wholesale stealing people's work and not paying for it. It's very hard to figure out a way to fix it.

All over the world copyright holders are trying to limit consumers' rights. We cannot have that.