[MD] Fencing the Air

[Platt Holden]

[Case]
If I decided to violate Anthony's copyright and post his "paper" on my 
website, the cost of reproduction and distribution would is $0.

[Platt]
If Anthony were a U.S. citizen, the cost to you of posting his 
copyrighted paper on your website might be $250,000 and 5 years in 
jail. From Wikepedia:

"The United States No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act), a federal law 
passed in 1997, provides for criminal prosecution of individuals who 
engage in copyright infringement, even when there is no monetary profit 
or commercial benefit from the infringement. Maximum penalties can be 
five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines. The NET Act also 
raised statutory damages by 50%.

"Prior to the enactment of the NET Act in 1997, copyright infringement 
for a noncommercial purpose was apparently not punishable by criminal 
prosecution, although noncommercial infringers could be sued in a civil 
action by the copyright holder to recover damages. At that time, 
criminal prosecutions under the copyright act were possible only when 
the infringer derived a commercial benefit from his or her actions. 
This state of affairs was underscored by the unsuccessful 1994 
prosecution of David LaMacchia, then a student at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology, for allegedly facilitating massive copyright 
infringement as a hobby, without any commercial motive. The court's 
decision in United States v. LaMacchia suggested that then-existing 
criminal law simply did not apply to noncommercial infringements (a 
state of affairs which became known as the "LaMacchia Loophole"). The 
court suggested that Congress could act to make some noncommercial 
infringements a crime, and Congress acted on that suggestion in the NET 
Act.

"The NET Act amends the definition of "commercial advantage or private 
financial gain" to include the exchange of copies of copyrighted works 
even if no money changes hands and specifies penalties of up to five 
years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines. It also creates a 
threshold for criminal liability even where the infringer neither 
obtained nor expected to obtain anything of value for the infringement.

"The NET Act raised the levels of statutory damages to $750 -- $30,000 
per work (or actual damages or infringer's profits, whichever is 
greater). In cases of willfull infringement, the act allows individuals 
to be held civilly liable for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per 
work infringed ).

"The NET Act could be applied to the unauthorized trading of infringing 
MP3 files, although music file-sharing was not yet widely practiced by 
1997. The infringements of greatest interest to industry at that time 
were primarily infringing copies of software."

[Platt]
Assuming the NET Act is still in force, I personally wouldn't want to 
risk taking another's work and putting it out there for anyone to 
steal. After all, nothing but the law -- and your moral conscience -- 
prevents you from copying Lila into a digital format and putting it on 
your website. 

My view is that anyone who works ought to have the right to claim
the product of his work as his property with all the rights of property 
ownership that a free market -- and a free life --- morally demands. To 
claim that the creation of ideas (thesis, software, song, etc.) doesn't 
require work is laughable on its face.

Platt