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You buy a CD but can't take it to the gym. The Audio Home Recording Act legalized our right to copy music for personal use -- for example, making a tape of a CD to use in a Walkman. But new copyright legislation makes it a crime to extract music from copy-protected CDs. You pay for cable but you aren't allowed to use your VCR. In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that making a copy of a TV show was a legal, non-infringing use of broadcast content. But new HDTV standards will make it illegal to copy a digital broadcast without the permission of the TV station. You buy a DVD but you can't watch it the way you want to. It seems obvious that users should have the ability to fast-forward and rewind movies as they see fit. But new copyright laws threaten that right: it is a crime to sell a DVD player that would allow a consumer to fast-forward through the ads at the beginning of a DVD! You own an electronic book, but you can't lend it to your son at college. Your right to lend a physical book is protected by the "first sale doctrine." This law states that purchasers of copyrighted works such as music or books have the right to dispose of the works in any way that they wish: they can sell them, loan them, rent them, or give them away. But new copyright laws criminalize all of those activities for digital content such as electronic books.

Companies that choose to publish works under copy protection do so because they believe that the added expense of implementing the copy protection will be offset by even greater increases in revenue by creating a greater scarcity of casually copied media. Opponents of copy protection argue that people who obtain free copies only use what they can get for free, and would not purchase their own copy if they were unable to obtain a free copy. Some even argue that it increases profit; people who receive a free copy of a music CD may then go and buy more of that band's music, which they would not have done otherwise. Some publishers have avoided copy-protecting their products, on the theory that the resulting inconvenience to their users outweighs any benefit of frustrating "casual copying".