Copyright
Copyright
[A colored drawing of a hilly, grassy landscape. Cueball is leaning against a tree.] Cueball: Sometimes I just can't get outraged over copyright law

Following the copyright wars can be tiring and irritating, but faced with the beauty of nature, the importance of such matters withers away.
Copyright is a monopoly granted by governments to writers, artists, performers, or corporations to control the distribution, copying, and performance of their creative expression or the creative expression of artists under contract with them. Before the digital age, it allowed authors and publishers an opportunity to profit from their work without fear of someone making copies and selling them for their gain.
In the digital age, when the cost and difficulty of copying has been reduced to near zero, it hasn't worked so well, especially for publishers of music and video. Industry trade organizations like the RIAA and MPAA have fought to preserve their old business models, lobbying for new laws to protect their income streams in an age where anyone can copy an MP3 file or a DVD quickly and cheaply. This has involved ordering web sites to take down "infringing" material (and many times material that wasn't infringing), media campaigns comparing file copiers to folks who commit murder on the high seas, and suing artists and writers who have used samples of music or movies in their own work. The RIAA has claimed that rampant illegal copying hurts the artists whose work is copied, as it cuts into the artists' royalty payments; many artists, on the other hand, complain that the RIAA's accounting practices have denied them their fair royalties for decades anyway, and that increased copying leads to increased fans and money through direct sales and is actually better for them than the RIAA.  It's a vicious war.
An early casualty in the copyright wars was Napster ; a later casualty was the concept of DRM (Digital Restrictions Malware) on recorded music and/or elsewhere. The wars have been going on since the early 1990s and show no sign of slowing down.
Slashdot and Boing Boing are two news aggregation websites that cover (among other things) the copyright wars in detail, usually biased against the RIAA, MPAA, and similar organizations.
[A colored drawing of a hilly, grassy landscape. Cueball is leaning against a tree.] Cueball: Sometimes I just can't get outraged over copyright law
