Yep -- even though you paid your $20 for that CD at Best Buy, you still do not "own" the music. You are not free to copy the CD and sell it, nor are you allowed to copy the CD and distribute it to your friends. Both of those things are illegal to do with physical CDs. You own the plastic and metalloid-film that the CD is made from (but NOT the music), and you own the ink that the CD was printed with (but not the actual artwork on the CD). It's this whole "intellectual property" thing. For someone who has created something, it's a good thing. For someone who would like to enjoy something that another has created, it can be frustrating.
It's just one of these things -- music is different... video is different... it's portable, and you can physically touch the medium on which it's delivered, and you can lock it away so that no one can watch it, but you don't actually own the "intellectual property" -- the music or the video -- that the medium contains. In a world of black-and-white "mine" and "not mine," it's tough to enforce rules with these kinds of things. Just because you CAN copy the file onto the gnutella network with little-to-no effort doesn't mean that you SHOULD or that it's legal.
If you were the artist, and you made a living from your movie or your songs, would you want people to purchase the movie/songs so that you can make money, or would you rather them freely trade the video/music effectively reducing your paycheck to $0? It's like a client not paying a design firm for their work but taking the design home anyway -- sure, you don't have to be face-to-face with Madonna in order to obtain her music, but it's still stealing.
Besides, what can you NOT do with your music now that you did in the past with other forms of media? You can listen to it at home on any device you want, you can take it with you in your car and to work, and you can copy it to a bunch of computers and still enjoy it. You can stream it to any computer you want. You can have a block party with it. You can do everything you could do with vinyl and cassettes and CDs and then some.
One thing you can't do that comes to mind is give it away for free. Whose loss is that? Seems more the recipient's loss than mine.
It seems to me that even though the customer will never exceed the limits of the restrictions, or even partake in anything that would exploit those restrictions, or ever encounter a situation where they cannot do what they wanted because of a restriction, it's the actual thought that something is restricting some sort of usage that bothers people.
I think the RIAA and all the new music-oriented companies have a long, long, long road ahead of them. It's going to be a long time before people agree on a middle ground, and the world seems to be pretty divided on this currently.
