Adventures of the RIAA/MPAA continued: What do you mean, sharing music is legal in Canada?

Tech Central Station | Blame Canada
While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution. In fact, you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process.

The reasoning could and should be adopted in American court defenses.

Here's the thing: If I rip an MP3 and store it on my hard drive, that's legal. That's private copying, fair use. If that drive happens to be shared on a network, the fact remains that I have not committed a crime. Still legal.

If I give a CD to a friend, and he makes a copy of a song on it, that's fair use too. If he happens to find that CD where I have left it (*ahem* on my hard drive) and make a copy, no crime has occurred. That's how Canadian law is expressly written, and that's the interpretation I think a canny lawyer could give to American law.

Don't get me wrong. As I've said, I do have some intellectual property out there that I'd like to protect. The RIAA doesn't get a cut: It's priced in such a manner that allows us to recoup our investment and sustain its manufacture. As it happens, it's a comparable price to "normal" commercially-available CDs. If Sony's mass production technology doesn't allow them to undercut a dozen people working out of a garage, then what good is it?