tricky lawyers and new media

Fred von Lohmann (on a mailing list, quoted with permission):

The history of the 20th century makes it clear, time and time again, that new media businesses are built by "tricky lawyers" helping their clients to plant a business in the lacunae and DMZs of copyright law. Broadcast radio, cable TV, jukeboxes, VCRs, MP3 players, are just some examples. In many of those cases, the legal rationales were far more outlandish than the DMCA rationales being invoked by Web 2.0 companies (in several cases, the lawyers lost the battle, but the businesses won the war).