What’s the reason behind this rule? Covering the Collective Doper Ass in case of legal issues?
At the very least, the Chicago Readers Ass. As a publishing company making its living by producing intellectual property, they take copyright infringements very seriously. As a result, the administration of the Straight Dope Message Board may frown on possible copyright infringements a little harder than the staff on your average message board. “We” wouldn’t allow someone else to get away with stealing our material. Not facilitating people to do the same onto others is merely being consistent.
Or just general dislike for the practice of stealing an artist’s work? If the file-sharing programs themselves aren’t illegal, then the practice of locking/deleting threads about illegal topics does not apply.
We realise that companies like KaZaa are not illegal. Nor are their products. They cleverly hide behind the old excuse: “well, we only meant for uncopyrighted stuff to be traded, but we have no control over what our end users put out there”. That is exactly why we close topics about them: everybody in their right mind knows that their defense is dishonest at best. Whether or not you personally think file sharing of copyrighted materials is immoral is your own call, but in the view of The Chicago Reader, it sure is. Hence our policy.
Would questions about, say, hosting an mp3 file on the web, or copying from CD to blank tape also be forbidden?
If the hosted MP3 is your own material, or otherwise not protected by copyright, then by all means, post away. You get the idea.
As for the second part: a bit of a gray area. If you’re copying a CD you bought onto tape so you can play it in the car, then that’s fine. If your OP reads “I’m cranking out the latest Weezer CD on tape for 5 bucks a piece”, expect a different reception. But a major part is the impact of it all. A program like KaZaa seriously hits the artists wallet, whereas the occasional illegal CD-to-tape copy has a much smaller impact. The same applies to burning CD’s. There are reasons to do this for personal use, and if you make it clear that this is the case, your thread probably won’t be closed.
Does the “Can’t talk about something legal if it’s connected, generally, to illegal activity” also apply to areas not involving intellectual property rights, or is that a special case?
Hmmm. Well, given the nature of business of the Reader, I suppose this is a bit of a special case. We reluctanlty allow discussions about the personal use of marijuana. But if a thread moves into the direction of where to obtain said marijuana, it’ll get closed. Does that answer your question?
From AmbushBug:
A major feature of my never posted rant was about how OpalCat should’ve asked if anyone had a videotape with the Capital I skit, seeing as how that sort of stuff seemed to get a free pass.
I can see how this is confusing. The Moonlighting thread you mention has a poster, after genuinely exhausting all other options, asking for help in finding a certain episode. Help arrives, and the rest is handled over e-mail. No mention of file sharing applications. Was it on the edge of what we allow? Definitely. But the posters involved went out of their way to keep a low profile about it, and that’s how it probably never got closed. No guarantees that it’ll pass the test again, but it just might.
The other thread you mention is a little more blatant than that, you’ll admit. Poster A asks for a song (which, admittedly, does not appear to be available through regular means anymore), another poster says they can grab it off KaZaa and e-mail it. If we allow that as a precedent, then we might as well allow any breach of copyright.
The video-of-an-old-Moonlighting-episode is a little different. First of all, it is quite OK to tape an episode for personal use: the taped episode of Moonlighting has been paid for by the network. You’re not hurting the copyright holder by taping it for yourself. And since the episode could not be bought through regular means (VHS, DVD), watching it on a borrowed tape is akin to watching a scheduled broadcast on TV: you would have paid the copyright holder if you could, but it wasn’t possible.
The KaZaa example you mention also covers a song that appears to be unavailable through regular means, BUT the method of aquiring it is far more controversial. Indeed, had that thread gone in the direction of “I have an old Muppets tape that you can borrow”, it would have had a better chance of staying open.
