RIAA thinks transferring CD that you own to your computer is stealing

I call that backing up a file. As long as I dont sell it or play it in public for money it isn't wrong. Not saying I make backups mind you.

 

Back in the days of vinyl, I always taped a new record and played the tape, thus preserving the vinyl and allowing me to retape when necessary. All my friends did the same. But there were no entertainment police around in those days. As long as I did not broadcast the tape, there were no problems.

So now, only the media has changed, but now they get upset about it.

 

That's what it's called here too. Unless they totally change the existing laws, it is legal to be able to copy your own music as long as you don't play it in public for money as Pat mentions.

 

You say it's legal. The RIAA says it's not and is going to court to get money from people who do it.

Existing Law is whatever the court says it is. So, we'll see who's 'legal' tomorrow.

 

The RIAA has been bat feces insane ever since blank cassettes came on the market.

They claim it's illegal to rip a copy of a CD you bought onto your own computer because that's "an illegal copy"? This implies putting from your computer onto your iPod is illegal, too, because THAT'S an unpaid-for copy.

As someone said on another board, it would be easier for them if they just tried to ban music.

 

" my name is Rae, and I rip CDs that I have bought."

We could start a support group, maybe.

 

I found this article posted on another board I frequent. It gives a nice insight into the music industry from someone who's been in the thick of it, and seen the progression (or lack thereof):

[FONT=verdana, arial, helvetica]As the years have passed, and technology has made digital files the most convenient, efficient, and attractive method of listening to music for many people, the rules and cultural perceptions regarding music have changed drastically. We live in the iPod generation - where a "collection" of clunky CDs feels archaic - where the uniqueness of your music collection is limited only by how eclectic your taste is. Where it's embraced and expected that if you like an album, you send it to your friend to listen to. Whether this guy likes it or not, iPods have become synonymous with music - and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226. How does that make sense? It's the ugly truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends....[/FONT]
​

Blog Linky...


It's a long read, but it goes into details of the inner workings of the slow-witted, monolithic dinosaur that is the music industry.

 

Unfortunately for this latest ploy by the RIAA, it's called Fair Use, and has been a part of Copyright law since 1976. There are 4 factors that are to be considered when determining if a copy is made under Fair Use: The purpose (are you trying to make a profit by copying the work), the nature of the material (Is it a DVD, CD, book, etc), the amount and sustainability of the copy (is it the entire thing, or just a small excerpt? Is it an exact copy, or is there a degradation in the quality of the copy?), and the effect of the copy on the market value of the work (are you providing the copy free to others, thus decreasing the market value of the original work?).

Clearly, most of the cases of copyright infringement the RIAA has gone after have been under this fourth provision - by sharing copyrighted music publicly, people are decreasing the fair market value of the music. If you can download the music for free, then why pay $0.99 per song?

Throughout copyright history, the courts have supported the users ability to make a personal use reproduction of a copyrighted work. Libraries can make copies of damaged texts without repercussions. Teachers can make copies of works for use in the classroom. Students can use quotes for reports without obtaining the copyright holders permission. And a customer can make a backup of a purchased work, so long as there is no distribution or intent for distribution. When it comes to making MP3's of songs on a CD, thats even a lossy backup - the MP3 isn't as good as the original due to the compression used. Making the MP3 for personal use doesn't decrease the fair market value of the music. Doing so doesn't provide any sort of economic incentive for the user. If the courts hold up that making, but not distributing MP3's is illegal, then they are trampling upon innovation and consumer rights. Think about it - back when MP3 players first started hitting the market (10 years ago), there was no readily accessible method for obtaining MP3's other than ripping them from your CD collection. That was the whole point of the MP3 player - being able to store all your music in one small device instead of carrying around a crate full of CD's. If that ripping was illegal, then the MP3 player never would have gotten off the ground. There would be no incentive for hardware vendors to create the players because people don't want to purchase their entire music collection a second time. There would be no incentive for online music stores because there would be no easy way for a customer to use the music away from their computer. More than anything, our country has supported innovation and invention, and this argument from the RIAA is only designed to stop that.

 

I burn backup copies which I like to take to my friends home and listen on his better sound system, sometimes I lose the CD before I get home so I need another so I burn another backup.

 

They don't want to ban it, they just want to figure out a way to make you pay every single time you listen to a song. That's what they dream about at night

 

There's a similar organisation in Canada. Apparently, they want royalties for every song that's played on the radio in any office open to the public. I'm all for giving the artists their due, but this is ridiculous.

 

It turns out that the Washington Post was spewing pure BS in this article...

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9839170-1.html

Apparently the brief never said that simply copying music to your computer was illegal. specifically, they assert that "Once (Howell) converted plaintiff's recording into the compressed MP3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiff.", Indicating that a part of the illegal process is having the music in his shared folder, thus distributing it.

 

Any business that has the radio playing that a customer might hear it must pay a licence fee here in Australia. That licence is distributed among recording artists. Yeah right! MAybe 10% is distributed after admin costs come out.

 

A certain San Francisco band (now defunct) ENCOURAGED concert goers to tape the shows and share/copy the tapes with friends. They even set up special taping sections, and sometimes provided a soundboard where tapers could plug directly into the board and eliminate microphones. It was through this largess that I first became a fan. In addition to many copied tapes, my collection over the years included almost all the entertainment-company produced offerings purchased at full price. Because I enjoyed the music, I attended so many concerts of that band that I lost count 20 years into my enjoyment. This is the only band which I own so much of their music. I have other favorite bands, but I can't buy into the whole greed thing so have purchased much less of their music. There has also been a trend in the past couple of years to make concert tickets so outrageously expensive that, again I choose to spend my money elsewhere. As a result I listen to less music now than ever before, and read more. The lesson to be learned? If you cut off your nose to spite your face no one will look at you. There are plenty of other options out there for entertainment. The present state of the music industry is like a snake eating it's tail. If the general public doesn't buy into the greed, then people will have less opportunity to turn their friends onto new music, creating less purchasing and less concert going. This reminds me of GM and their building crap hoping for planned obsolescence. People just abandoned them all together and found their jollies elsewhere. This makes it all the harder for GM to comeback since many people feel so burned they will never return to the old days.

 

FWIW, this topic came up today on Marc Fisher's online chat on washingtonpost.com:


20001: Can you comment on the CNET story/blog posted today that you misstated the facts in your story on the RIAA? http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9839170-7.html?tag=nefd.top
( NewsBlog, Jan. 3)

Marc Fisher: This is a response to my Sunday Listener column about the recording industry's continuing legal campaign against music consumers. The industry's trade group, the RIAA, is apparently arguing that my column was incomplete in that I didn't focus on the root cause of their lawsuit against the Arizona family I wrote about. Indeed, that case, like nearly all the RIAA lawsuits, stems from some corporate snooping in which the RIAA's consultant, a company called MediaSentry, found music files on the "shared files" folder of the Howells' computer. But there's no news there. What's news in that case, and what I therefore wrote about, was the legal argument that industry lawyers have now made in at least a couple of cases that the very act of copying music from a legally-obtained CD onto a computer is "unauthorized" and illegal. In its public policy statements, the RIAA says that making a personal copy is "usually" ok, but in legal documents, the industry takes a tougher stand, saying that even such personal transfers are not necessarily ok.

My point was and is that the industry is sending a very mixed and confused message and is only further alienating the music-buying public.


M Street NW, Washington, D.C.: Marc, it's NOT just the RIAA that is "claiming" you got the facts and arguments in the case wrong; it's EVERY person under the sun that is involved in this issue. Even people who are advocates of fair use and consumer rights know (and are publicly stating) that your piece was factually inaccurate.

Marc Fisher: Nice try, but not quite. The vast majority of the comments I've seen have agreed with both the presentation and the argument in my column. Others are of course free to spin the case as they see fit. But the facts are the facts: The industry sued the Howells for sharing the music. The Howells deny any sharing. In arguing the case, the industry says, correctly, that sharing is illegal, but the RIAA lawyer goes on to argue, interestingly, that the very act of making a copy is unauthorized as well. That's what we call news.

 

And now the RIAA and Fisher have had it out on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2008/01/rip_this_and_sue_that.html

The substance of the debate was the RIAA pointing out that Fisher took things out of context, and Fisher avoiding it and moving on to something else. The Testimony quoted in his piece by a Sony lawyer was acknowledged as being misspoken, as she apparently thought the question was about downloading music illegally over the internet (keep in mind that the issue of downloading music hasn't been tried in court, only sharing), when in fact it was about ripping a CD for personal use... yeah, it's a big mistake, but he said, very clearly, that "That is not the position of Sony BMG. That is not the position of that spokesperson. That is not the position of the industry."

From what i heard in the debate, it seems pretty clear that Fisher is trying to defend a pretty big mistake he made in writing that article. It's really more of a question of journalism ethics than it is one of law, as Fisher's claims were never brought up by the RIAA.

 

And the conclusion to the story:

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9843939-1.html

The Post issued a correction to the article.

 

You are definitely allowed to make backups of what you have. I do the same with everything that I have. The RIAA takes things too seriously nowadays that almost everything is pirated