Music, Copyright & The Internet

"Like it or not (I'm guessing not), music is intellectual property that gets licensed, not sold. When you buy a CD, you're only buying the hard media that comes with a license to listen to the music that is recorded on that media. The fair use exception to copyright gives you some wiggle room about what you can do with that disc, such as make an archive recording, play the disc on your PC (an act which probably causes the PC to make a few different extra copies of the music as it plays the disc), etc.The owner of a copyright has the freedom to license some, all, or none of the rights that come bundled with the over-arching copyright to a protected work. The owner can license only the right to listent to the music on that disk, or he can license a right to perform the song, or to play it in public, or to incorporate that song into a movie or television commercial. This is not evil (or even greedy)... it is merely the nature of a copyright."