At 12:12 PM 8/19/2004 -0400, James L Wolf wrote: >Can't argue with this. Certainly the only people making available most >classic jazz, blues, country, etc. are either operating illegally in the >US or are importing here from Europe. Funny how the law discriminates >against small American businesses who want to reissue this stuff, but >not against European businesses. Perhaps that point could persuade some >Congress members, but probably not enough. Sorry, but you appear to have misunderstood. 1. U.S. law applies to activities in the U.S., not to those in other countries. A Romanian company making recordings for sale in Hong Kong is violating no law; neither is the recipient. However, it is illegal to import into the U.S. material which violates U.S. law. Therefore, anyone buying such a recording from Hong Kong - whether an individual, a retailer or a distributor - is in violation and is subject to penalty. Since that sort of thing cannot be policed in practice for individuals or small shops, it is used to threaten and/or to control wholesale piracy of this class - promoting thereby another form of piracy, duplicating commercial recordings legally available in the U.S. In my opinion, the problem is not localized or subject to patchwork solution. The concept of protection of intellectual property needs to be examined from first principles, recognizing the ease of replication and distribution and that the term "border" has a meaning in most respects entirely different from that in the dictionary. I believe that it goes farther than the above in that control of dissemination has moved from the entities which have the rights to the consumers who select content. However, discussion of those issues merely wastes 'bandwidth' until an organization is prepared to take up the sword of logic and the shield of principle against the corporate behemoth of funding. Mike -- [log in to unmask] http://www.mrichter.com/