are not copied and posted, on walls or on computer desktops, with the per-
mission of anyone.

All these _uses_ occur without the express permission of the copyright
holder. They are unlicensed and uncompensated ways in which copy-
righted works get used.

Not all of these uses are impermissible uses. Many are protected by ex-
ceptions built into the Copyright Act. When you buy a book, you are free to
loan it to someone else. You are free to copy a small section of the book and
give it to a friend. Under the Audio Home Recording Act, you are free to
copy music from one medium to another. Taped recordings of records are
therefore quite legal.

But some of these uses of copyrighted works may well be illegal. To post
the poster may be a public display of the poster not authorized by the pur-
chase.[11-4] To use icons on your computer of _Simpsons_ cartoons is said by Fox
to violate its rights. And if too much of an assigned text has simply been
copied by the student, then that copying may well exceed the scope of "fair
use."

The reality of dorm rooms, however -- and, for that matter, most private
space in real space -- is that these violations, if they are violations, don't mat-
ter much. Whether or not the law technically gives a student the right to
have a _Simpsons_ cartoon on his desktop, there is no practical way for Fox
Broadcasting Company to enforce its rights against overeager fans. The fric-
tion of real space sets the law of real space. And that friction means that for
most of these "violations," there is no meaningful violation at all.

Now imagine all this activity moved to cyberspace. Rather than a dorm
room, imagine that a student builds a home page. Rather than taped LPs,
imagine he produces MP3 translations of the original records. _The_Simp-_
sons cartoon is no longer just on his desktop; imagine it is also on his Web
server. And likewise with the poster: the rock star, we can imagine, is now
scanned into an image file and introduces this student's Web page.

How have things changed?

Well, in one sense, one might say the change is quite dramatic. Now,
rather than simply posting this content to a few friends who might pass
through the dorm room, this student is making this content available to mil-
lions around the world. After all, pages on the World Wide Web are avail-
able anywhere in the world. Millions use the World Wide Web. Millions
can now, for free, download the content that this student posted.

But there's a gap in this logic. There are millions who use the World

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