Regarding the "illegal downloading" point, simple question: how do you recognize when the music, movie, photograph, or text that you downloaded (or viewed in browser -- there's no technical difference) has been "properly" licensed?
I think most people know it's illegal when they go to download (or view) a movie on the 'net.
What about hulu.com? Should we have a list of "approved" websites somewhere? Also, how do you know that hulu has proper licenses for their videos?
There was a recent case when Amazon licensed (remember, that we're dealing with licensing in case of copyright laws, not selling) "1984" for Kindles for which they didn't have the proper license. Why haven't those people (who downloaded the book into their Kindles) been prosecuted? It would be easy to do, since Amazon had the list of customers. Or should we apply laws selectively?
Kind of straying from the mark. She was convicted because she ran the site, not because she uploaded one movie. In that example, its Amazon at 'fault'.
I think the onus lies on the distributor (Amazon, Hulu, NinjaViedo) more so than the consumer. I do believe the consumer holds a relative degree of responsibility (and I guess this is what should be determined by a court) - e.g. it's obvious with Ninja, but some sites might not be so obvious e.g. if, like Amazon, Netflix distributed a movie that they did not have rights to -- then it falls on them.
OK, if the court can determine whether a consumer has a degree of responsibility, surely a consumer can determine if she's participating in a "copyright infringement"? If you search the Web for "watch big buck bunny online free" and download/watch one of the found files, can you tell when you infringe copyright and when not?
