Classic. The record industry — or at least the big boys in the RIAA — get their first chance to air their sophisticated arguments in court as part of a high-profile lawsuit involving an individual who downloaded music, and what do they say? That even making a copy of a single song from a CD you paid for is theft. Mind-boggling.
This statement came from (no surprise) the chief litigator for Sony-BMG, the same gang that thinks installing a Trojan on your computer is a great business model. When asked whether it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music that they had purchased, Jennifer Pariser said: “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making a copy of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’.” I guess we should pull all those law books out of the library and strike out any reference to “fair use” then. Nice work there by the RIAA. Of course as Ars Technica points out, this isn’t the first time they have made that claim, despite the fact that the courts have repeatedly disagreed.