Blame the Apple iPhone for my new love affair with mobile video. I've always taken a skeptical view of video on pint-size devices—until recently. A few weeks ago, I took the elegant device on a business trip. I watched the "Scott Baio Is 45 . . . And Single" reality-show premiere, along with other brainless video treats. Most screens on devices of this genre, even the one on the iPod with Video, are too small for my enjoyment. Thanks to the iPhone, I've turned a corner and started thinking about all the other video I might consume on this pocket-size device.

Like most consumers, my eyes naturally turned to the massive DVD collection I have sitting in my den. I've got almost a decade's worth of my favorite movies, ones I've seen more than once and plan on watching again. I also know that my future is filled with business trips. So, the natural answer is to get that DVD content onto the iPhone.

But that would be breaking the law.

Others, however, believe it represents fair use.

The term "fair use" was a widely recognized, albeit not specifically codified agreement between content creators and consumers for decades. It became an official part of copyright law in 1976, right around the time VCRs arrived. Prior to these soon-to-be ubiquitous recording devices, fair-use questions dealt largely with copying portions of books for research papers and use in classrooms, and the somewhat less-common practice of backing up audio LPs to tape.

The VCR changed things. Suddenly, consumers could copy entire television shows and even movies from broadcast TV. The movie studios and television networks grew concerned, and it became obvious that more onerous copyright controls would essentially kill the VCR industry before it even had a chance to begin.

Fast-forward to the digital age, with its content-copying free-for-all. We can use camcorders small enough to fit into the palm of our hand to capture high-def video. That's right, the guy sitting next to you in a movie theater during an emotional moment in Transformers ("Oh no, not Bumblebee!) is not wiping his eyes. He's recording the movie with his tiny camcorder.

We encounter content piracy at every turn: Street corners are littered with a wide selection of pirated DVDs, thousands of unsanctioned studio and network clips are all over YouTube, and, recently, the world was stunned to find complete PDF pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Internet long before it arrived on store shelves.

Fair use made sense only as long as replicating mass-market distribution of major content was virtually impossible for individuals. The digital nature of all content and easy access to the Internet and a broadband pipe has fundamentally changed the equation.

So where does that leave me and the other law-abiding citizens who simply want to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on their iPhones? Content providers counsel buying a purely digital version from iTunes. Nuts to them—I'm not paying twice.

This Pandora's box of content copying is not going to vanish anyway.—next: An Experiment >