An act that is ethically wrong cannot be justified simply on the basis that there is no actual law forbidding it.

An act that is _not_ ethically wrong does not become ethically wrong because the legislature passes a law against it. How many of us believe that our elected legislators are better judges of right and wrong than we are ourselves?

The internet has knocked the whole law of intellectual property into a shambles. When everything - text, pictures, music, even full-motion video - is just ones and zeroes, and anyone with a computer and an internet connection can get at any string of ones and zeroes that is on any other computer that's on line, intellectual property law becomes unenforeceable. Period. Any realistic enforcement of intellectual property laws would require shutting down the internet, or at least strictly limiting access to it. And it's probably too late for that.

The impossibility of enforcing the laws does _not_ change the taking of other people's property without compensation from an immoral act to a moral one. To say it does is to say "Anything I do is all right if I don't get caught." Which I think most of us would agree is not an adequate moral code.

Congress, missing the point as usual, has tried to deal with the problem by passing more and stricter intellectual property laws. They should be cutting back on the strictness of these laws, so that the public will be likely to accept them as reasonable.

We got along for many years with a 28-year-plus-one-28-year-renewal term of copyright - 56 years total. If we'd kept it, everything composed up to nearly the end of WWII would now be public domain. I think anyone who's composed anything prior to that has already taken most of the profit they could reasonably expect...

But I'm rambling.

Peter.