Judge cuts file-sharing fine to $67,500
“Even if a copyrighted work’s commercial availability factors into the fair-use analysis, a consumer does not have a right to demand that a copyright owner make his work available in the exact format that the consumer desires.”
Maybe … But if a record label is the only entity allowed to distribute a specific work produced by a specific artist(s) for a protected duration of time, then said record label effectively holds a monopoly on that content … Which might have worked fine when the main distribution model was a physical object, but hat no longer holds true. Considering the amount of music currently sold via digital distribution, format availability must be standardized for this ruling to make any logical sense.
