RIAA: It's illegal to transfer music from cd to computer

I thought that the courts had already decided that making a copy for your personal use was covered under Fair Use and legal? The thing that comes to mind was making cassette copies of record albums so that you could listen to the latest Boston or Foreigner record in your car.

I think that the quality of the copy has something to do with the law and because cassette copies are inferior to the original it was deemed ok. If that is true (and I'm not sure that it is), then MP3s should be perfectly legal as they are inferior to the original. The difference is that they don't degrade when you make copies of copies like cassette tapes do.

PS. From what I understand it has always been illegal to make threats against any president's physical well being. The Secret Service takes any and all threats of that type very seriously and always has. It's just that before the internet you never heard about any of this stuff as most "casual" threats were just made out loud. They were never published. Anything you leave on the Internet (pictures, video, text, etc..) is technically published to the entire world. People need to remember that anything they put on the Internet has the very real probability of existing somewhere (some backup archive or something) until the end of the human race.

 

Luckily there are more crappy bands than they are good nowadays so I don't worry about purchasing and copying any.
Pretty soon it's gonna be illegal to purchase a CD.

 

No it'll be legal to purchase. It'll be illegal to play it more than once.

 

Well, if they really want to set an example...



From April, 2006:

Or perhaps they can start with Hillary, who also has Beatles tunes on her iPod:

The RIAA are a bunch of cowards. Some young up-and-coming Clarence Darrow type ought to sue them. Even if you lose, you make a name for yourself and expose them for the hypocritical greedy pigs they are.

 

fixed

 

Time to boycott, and it wouldn't be very difficult.

That'll dry-up the legal coffers.

 

That was my point- if you put something on the internet, it can probably be traced back to you via IP.

I thought that a small part of the PA spelled out that you can't subvert copywright protection. It's why modchips and DVD copy software are illegal.

 

That's my understanding too that fair use should allow you to make a copy for your own use. I don't know how the quality issue plays into it though.

On a related note I've ripped many of my CD's onto my laptop and when I got a new one I just copied the files over and they didn't play on my new laptop. I got a message saying that Windows Media Player wouldn't play them unless they came from the origional CD.

 

The supreme court has ruled format shifting legal (the famous "betamax" case). This ruling, incidentally, saved hollywood from total bankruptcy in the 80s... But I digress.

Your problem with windows is that WMP encodes DRM into the files when you rip them. Ditch that ****ty piece of crap and use any of the myriad of "non-DRM" mp3 encoders. Itunes can do this, if you prefer "name brand" software.

 

^ thanks for the tip!

 

is somebody gonna post the south park music episode... where the swat team crashes into i think stans house for downloading music

i'm too lazy

 

is BLADEenc (Blade Encoder) still out there? That's what I originally used a while back.

Cohen, I'm with you. I've been boycotting for a long time, ever since I've known I could get files transfered from the Internet to my PC, I have only bought maybe 2 or 3 CDs.

 

duplicate!

 

are they going to try and close down used cd stores too? i probably buy about 25 cds a year, but 2/3's of them are used.

i think ringo should be allowed to waterboard george bush for illegally having beatles music on his ipod.

 

I was under the impression that the Government can say what is legal or not legal, not some silly RIAA organization. If an organization can make something illegal, then couldn't PETA say the same thing about slaughtering animals?

 

I'm clearly no lawyer but the way I understnad it it's alll about interpreting the law. The DA can interpret the law a certain way and press charges against someone just to see if they stick. If the DA wins that sets precident and that interpretationg is considered valid.

Regular citizens and bring lawsuits against individuals because they interpret law a certain way and if they win that's the way the law goes.