UD: I think you mis-spoke about "congress making a ruling" as Congress makes legislation and courts make rulings over constitutionality and legality. The courts have made several rulings in favor of copyright protection over the internet, such as in regards to the Napster case. While no copy protection system seems foolproof today, now that big-budget movie studio have gotten into the fray to protect their products, I believe we'll see some tougher intellectual property standards and laws in the coming year.

As to your example about taping TV shows and broadcasts - the broadcasters themselves pay for the royalties to the copyright holders in such cases. Even if you tape it, the fees were paid by somebody before it got to you. No such broadcaster fees exist on the web (yet).

Interestingly, I loaded KaZaa on a test computer to check out several aspects. There is a long and detailed user agreement you have to acknowledge to load this software agreeing not to allow copyrighted material to be distributed from your computer with it. So unless you are allowing only your own original music/images/software etc. to be transfered with this program, then you are using it illegally. KaZaa loaded eight different "spyware" programs when it installed - when I used Ad-Aware to remove the spyware, KaZaa was disabled. There isn't much doubt that KaZaa has been built specifically to monitor and track your usage of it and send that information somewhere. That may be only for marketing today but certainly could be used for billing/collection purposes tomorrow.

I believe the article I provided proves that intellectual property laws are enforcable and test cases are under way. Now the real question is whether or not you want to become one of those test cases...