Of course, I completely agree with that :-).
> Copyright expires after certain amount of years, depending on the country and the law?
Yes. In case you didn’t notice, this is specifically about a case in one country, for things that are still under copyright.
> it looks to me like you are an afforded troll by the company to spread out the company propaganda on the internet and social media sites. I can't tell for sure, I might be wrong, but that is how it looks to me.
No, it doesn’t look like this at all. You are egregiously wrong.
Op asked us to not tell him they are "greedy bastards", and he asks that because he knows they are. Op knows he is wrong for the obvious reasons and asks us to not see him as "wrong" and to close eyes and pretend those reasons just do not exist. It is just stupid.
> You are egregiously wrong.
Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I am not. I have drawn my conclusion after reading all of the comments and seen all of his replies and link he posted, that is how I perceive them.
Copyright expires after certain amount of years, depending on the country and the law?
> My guess is that they are arguing fair use, but I just don't see how that applies here when they make copyrighted works available, for free, over the Internet.
To start with, those companies hold "copyrights" because people who actually performed or wrote the material didn't have possibility for various reasons to retain those copyrights for themselves. Just that fact is morally disgusting in itself.
> Would appreciate it if folks would abstain from responding with how the record companies are greedy bastards
What Sony & Co do in this matter, and with the entire "copyright" industry, is making billions of profit without hardly giving something back to original copyright owners. Perhaps we should make a law that makes it impossible to transfer the copyright to greedy industry to start with, which would makes such nonsense like this one impossible.
> I'm not a lawyer, and I'm just interested in trying to understand if they have any legal defense that isn't going to get laughed out of court.
Perhaps you are not a lawyer, but looking at your comment, it looks to me like you are an afforded troll by the company to spread out the company propaganda on the internet and social media sites. I can't tell for sure, I might be wrong, but that is how it looks to me.