Fan rights and responsibilities: Summary

• People are accustomed to lending CD's, books, and other objects to friends, which with a physical object is perfectly legal. However, with digital data, "move" or "lend" is not an atomic operation -- it is composed of "copy" followed by "delete", and it's all to easy to forget the "delete" step.
• Customers are frustrated with apparently high costs, and arbitrary pricing structures and granularity on what can be purchased -- this manifests itself with pop music, where the desire for a single song could force customers to pay close to $20 for the entire album. Couple this with the fact that the artist doesn't receive most of that money, but that it goes to middlemen who are perceived as bad guys, and it's easy to rationalize making an unauthorized copy.
• Lack of a legitimate way to pay for digitally delivered content could encourage people to think that the copyright holders don't actually care about such a revenue source, and/or induce a "you snooze, you lose" mentality with regards to the copyright holders' rights to protect their content.
• Most ethically tricky, many argue that the traditional copyright and royalty payment systems are flawed and deliver money to the wrong people; that "right" and "legal" are not necessarily quite the same thing. In the extreme, copying content illegally -- and intentionally refusing to obtain the content through a licensed source -- could be seen as responsibile civil disobedience.

These complicating factors could explain the large number of people who consider themselves law-abiding citizens but who have few or no qualms about copying copyrighted content.

It's clear that at the very least, audiences need to be given a way to do the right thing with new media, because even otherwise honest people will do the wrong thing rather than nothing at all. Beyond this, to some extent honest people will be honest when given the choice, and dishonest people dishonest, and people will continue to make their own decisions, but it could be helpful to encourage lawful behavior with practical and financial incentives as well as legal repercussions.