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* Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 28 Dec 1999
| I'm a lawyer. Magic's definition of "commercial" is silly. It is not
| commercial activity if I find a penny on the sidewalk. But really,
| that's just common sense isn't it? If you trade enough MDs for the
| wrong reasons it would be commercial activity. God only know how many
| it would take. It's like asking how many angels dance on the head of
| a pin.
In the US, copyright infringement falls under civil law, which means a lot
of stuff but the most relevant aspect at the moment is that it is the
responsibility of the infringed party to pursue action against the
infringer. But if the damages resulting from infringement or repeated
infringement of registered copyright or copyrights exceeds $2,500 it
becomes federal felony and the FBI will probably become involved. Now,
calculating "damages" is not strictly tied to dollar cost. But if you do
oversimplify and figure that the estimated value of an illegally
distributed copy of an audio CD is about half its street price, all it
takes is a few hundred such copies for the record company to slap you with
a criminal suit.
Put another way, say you are part of a "trading ring" of about 30 people,
and the deal is, you buy an audio CD, everyone else provides media, and you
make copies. If each of you does that 10 times, your ring will probably
have easilly exceeded the $2,500 threshold by a fair margin, making the lot
of you federal criminals.
Fun, huh? :)
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