Reply #15: There are a lot of gray areas in copyright law [View All]

and the only reason I feel qualified to comment is I was involved for five years as a plaintiff in a copyright lawsuit.

As weird as it sounds, when you buy a pair of shoes or a Cadillac you are purchasing a license on the design of that one item. That does not give you the legal right to fabricate another item, even if it is only for your own use. But it's important to remember that even if 1,000,000 people decided to make shoes for themselves, enforcement of the law is a civil matter and is always at the discretion of the copyright/patent holder--so they may get away with it. No agency is "forced" to protect them.

When you buy a CD and sell it to a used CD store, you are selling the license along with the physical disk and packaging itself. So the license is transferred to the store, and thereafter to whomever buys it from them.

Your "junk parts" scenario is an interesting one. I believe the law would probably rule that by purchasing the individual design license on each piece you have in effect purchased a license on the whole car.

I tend to favor copyright/patent protection but it is clear it can be carried to absurd extremes. In the case of the "Kazaa Mom" it wasn't the enforcement but the penalty which was extreme, IMO.