[colinsane]

my friend had some old Cowboy Bebop DVDs he got from a garage sale way back. i bought them off him, and then visited a 2nd friend's place to rip them using her DVD reader, and having done so showed the series to a 3rd friend group next time i visited them. it was a hit, and after i left one of the friends wanted to watch the bonus features. so i gave him access to the FTP server i keep all my media on and he copied it off there.

by the law as media companies would wish us to understand it, this is piracy. but when and by whom was a contract broken during this chain of events? i shared the content with my friend, but my purchase of the DVD wasn't conditional upon any agreement not to, so it couldn't have been me who broke a contract. was the contract broken by the person at the garage sale who sold the DVD without verifying that the recipient wouldn't pass it on to another recipient who would then duplicate it? if so, doesn't that same logic imply the DVD manufacturer broke a contract? if this is how you imagine the contract to function, it would seem the existence of piracy _anywhere_ in this chain means that the entire industry is criminal.

this isn't a hypothetical, btw. there actually is a Bebop DVD out there with a chain of custody that complex (actually more complex by now).

[tsimionescu]

There is a clear expectation in law for at least 100-200 years now that owning a copy of a piece of media doesn't allow you to copy or perform it. This is by no means a new concept, and you broke the social contract the moment you copied the DVD. This may not be printed on every book and DVD, but it is very clear - you own the physical copy, not the text.

There are other gray areas related to property and copyright. This is not one of them.

[colinsane]

sure, i can identify the moment in this chain when copyright law may have been violated. it's the contract part i'm caught up with though: law is a thing which exists whether i agree to it or not, but contracts are agreements opted into. and i can't identify any moment where i reneged on any agreement, implied (the friend i bought that DVD from knew me well enough to understand what that meant) or otherwise.

[atq2119]

Your dates are off by more than a century though. Initial copyright terms were barely more than a decade. Cowboy Bebop would have been fair game.

[tsimionescu]

Duration of copyright is separate from the principle. The current durations of copyright are obviously crazy. But that doesn't mean we should just do away with copyright entirely.