[gqfrzfdn] Federalism and copyright

In federalism, the national and state governments share power.  Ordinary citizens in their day-to-day activities are generally not meant to run afoul of federal law: this demarcates where federal power ends and state power begins.  As a corollary, there are deliberately far fewer federal courthouses than state courthouses: if ordinary citizens were constantly getting in trouble with federal law, there would not be enough federal courts to handle the case load.

Copyright was originally assigned as a federal power because it was assumed most ordinary citizens would not be infringing copyright.  Embedded in this assumption was that only commercial infringement of copyright matters in the eyes of the law; most ordinary citizens would not be engaging in commercial infringement of copyright.

Technology changed (p2p file sharing) and now content owners would like to, if they could (and they've tried), sue all copyright infringers in federal court because copyright is a federal power.  However, there aren't enough federal courts to handle a significant portion of the population running afoul of federal law.  This is not how federalism is supposed to work.

Several possible solutions:
* Reassign copyright to be a state power.  The extra advantage of this is that different states can experiment with different copyright laws to try to discover a good policy in the light of new technology, and different states can be compared.
* Reassign only regulating noncommercial copyright infringement to be a state power.  Federal courts can handle the still relatively rare case of commercial copyright infringement, where the infringer is trying to make a profit off the infringement.
* Revert all noncommercial copying to legal, as it was (de facto) when the Constitution was written.