14 DAY TRIAL // The entertainment industry is able to get away with increasingly abusive interpretations of copyright law because there's no one there to oppose it.
Some civil rights groups will fight the obvious abuses, but they don't have the money or the manpower to compete with the music and movie industry's powerful lobbying arms.
The only time these abuses are really challenged in court is when they affect another company. For example, Amazon is fighting against a clearly undefendable blanket "copying fee" applied to all recording media.
According to the music industry, any medium that can be used to store music is definitely being used to store music, illegally of course, and, as such, the music industry must be paid a fee. When the mob does it, it's called racketeering; when the entertainment corporations do it, it's called a "levy."
Still, particularly in Europe, these levies have been quite widely used. But music industry groups are not content with just getting a piece of every blank CD, every USB storage device, and every MP3 player sold now, they also want to get paid for the ones sold in the past.
One Austrian copyright-collecting agency has sued Amazon for the money it believes it is owed for every blank media sold by the ecommerce giant during 2002 and 2004.
Naturally, Amazon fought back against the lawsuit, but the agency won in several lower courts. The case has finally ended up before EU's highest court, which has now tossed it back to the Austrian Supreme Court.
The EU Court of Justice decided that such a blanket fee is acceptable in certain conditions. However, it also said that the EU legislation prohibits such a levy if the intended use of the blank media is clearly not making private copies.
As for how exactly to determine what everyone who bought a blank CD from Amazon during that period intended to do with it, the EU court deferred the question to Austria's highest court.