Ars Technica gives a good summary of what's going on between the RIAA and the EFF in the current copyright fights in the courts - and it's stranger than I thought. Take this, for instance:

As far as the courts are concerned, the issue of distribution and digital transmission is significantly murkier. The EFF's brief illuminates just how murky the issue is, with some courts taking for granted that digital transmission does constitute infringing distribution and at least one lower court hewing to the letter of the law and ruling that it does not. The EFF therefore urges the US District Court to be the first court to explicitly tackle the issue of digital transmission and distribution, and to define "distribution" so that it requires the exchange of a physical object.

The part that's fascinating and somewhat ironic, at least to me, is that the EFF is now in the position of arguing in favor of an outmoded, pre-Internet concept of "distribution," and one that runs directly counter the plain sense of the way that both the language and the concept of "digital content distribution" is currently employed in just about any online venue where the topic is discussed. Would anyone argue that Apple is not, in fact, in the business of distributing music now? (Actually, that's a bad example, because Apple may be arguing exactly that in their ongoing dispute with Apple Records. Still, you get the point.)

I hadn't given that much thought - but the existing law depends on a physical transfer of a copyrighted work. As I vaguely recall, copy machines introduced a monkey wrench that took awhile to sort out - a lot of "fair use" precedent derives from the case law that resulted from that invention. So here we have the internet, which - as Ars Technica notes - throws a huge wrench into the entire (legal) of distribution. If I upload a copyrighted work, have a transferred it? What if that upload isn't to a public system, but simply to another device I own? What if the upload is to another media format? That's what's at stake here, and it's all up in the air at the moment.