Record Piracy and Copyright: Present Inadequacies and Future Overkill

This comment explores different types of piracy from both a legal and an economic point of view, and suggests that raising the status of some of the economic distinctions to legal distinctions may well serve the public interest better than the present legal distinctions or those proposed in the Copyright Revision Bill. In brief, the record companies are rightfully concerned about the vast amount of piracy of many of their most profitable recordings. On the other hand, there are vast numbers of unavailable and presumably unprofitable recordings which are apparently desired by some consumers and many musical works which, and performers who are never commercially recorded at all. Much of the concern of this comment is to explore means of making such material available.