[belorn]

Calling it a grey area between RIAA/MPAA and the "information wants to be free" crowd might do it a disservice. The goal of criminal law is to give out punishments and incapacitate those who violate a subset of laws, while civil law emphasis victim compensation.

If someone is redistributing information without a license in a not-for-profit manner, what is more important. Retribution and punishment, or victim compensation to the individual who produced the information?

Digital media, or someone printing out a pamphlet. Does the technology really matter when deciding what the goal of the law is? To me, it sound obvious that non-profit redistribution of information without a license is at most a civil law crime. That has nothing to do with "information wants to be free", and all to do with common sense in regard to the fundamental design of laws.

[Spooky23]

I gave those examples as polar extremes. RIAA's initial, extreme, position in 1997 was that you will pay $25 for a CD or $5 for a single (with selection limited by the publisher), period. Time passed, and now you have a broader array of choices (iTunes pay for a perpetual license, the Spotify-style subscription model, etc).

It depends on your point of view. If I paid a sports league millions of dollars for the right to broadcast a game, and you decided that you would take my broadcast and re-broadcast it for free, you are damaging me to the tune of millions of dollars -- dollars that you cannot possibly repay.

Technology is key here, because it lowered the barriers to reproducing content. Printing a pamphlet in 1850 was a big deal -- you needed a printing press and specialized workers. Today, you need 5 minutes and a $50 printer. Same story with vinyl records, or projector film.

At the end of the day, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. If I were King, I'd say that copyright holders are entitled to fair compensation, but in return for that compensation, society is entitled to have things enter the public domain in a reasonable period of time as well.

[Dylan16807]

No matter how many millions it should still be a civil matter unless there's some kind of fraud going on.

Also a single person rebroadcasting is probably only making a handful of copies. You can't say that they are personally damaging you for all those millions of dollars. Unless you want to exonerate everyone else in the swarm.

[belorn]

But that leaves my question unanswered; The question on whats is the goal. Is the goal that the copyright holders should be compensated, or that violators get punished? I law can only be in one of those two camps.