Congress has voted to make not-for-profit copyright infringments a federal felony, as I write in my article at: http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1588,00.html A Federal court in _LaMacchia_ noted that: "Since 1897, when criminal copyright infringement was first introduced into U.S. copyright law, the concept differentiating criminal from civil copyright violations has been that the infringement must be pursued for purposes of commercial exploitation." This now changes. For the first time in the history of the U.S., nonprofit (noncommercial) copying is a crime. When doing research for the story I stumbled across this quote, from the Supreme Court in Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): ...Interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: "Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner..." [...] The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially like infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion or fraud. -Declan ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/