Slashdot Mirror
RIAA: Ripping CDs to iPod not 'Fair Use'
dotpavan writes "EFF has this article about RIAA saying that ripping CDs and backing them up does not come under Fair use.
Ars Technica also reports on this, by quoting, "The [submitted arguments in favor of granting exemptions to the DMCA] provide no arguments or legal authority that making back up copies of CDs is a noninfringing use. In addition, the submissions provide no evidence that access controls are currently preventing them from making back up copies of CDs or that they are likely to do so in the future. Myriad online downloading services are available and offer varying types of digital rights management alternatives. For example, the Apple FairPlay technology allows users to make a limited number of copies for personal use. Presumably, consumers concerned with the ability to make back up copies would choose to purchase music from a service that allowed such copying. Even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices. Similar to the motion picture industry, the recording industry has faced, in online piracy, a direct attack on its ability to enjoy its copyrights.""
An organisation whose entire business model is now to resell the same product over and over again is hardly going to say that buying it once is enough. But in a world of "one dollar, one vote", who's going to stop them?
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
So are they arguing that you have to buy music from an online dealer (something akin to iTunes) if you want to be able to use your portable device? Sounds like just one more reason not to buy CDs.
NINJA SPIRIT - The Ancient Art of Insanity
When I was a kid my, my friend's dad has an audiophile turntable, cassette deck and reel-to-reel setup. When I would purchase and album, I would take it over to his house and copy it to cassette and sometimes reel-to-reel. I would never play the album again unless I lost or damaged the cassette. What options would I have today if the RIAA has their way?
All the worlds indeed a
... but this is simply going too far!
And to all the people who laugh when you tell them that the record companies would rather have you pay twice or more for music that you already bought, well here's proof. They really, honestly, do believe that what you bought is not yours. It's still theirs to do with as they please.
Starting tomorrow, I'm going to start bringing my CD's back, even old ones. Nothing of this was mentioned when I bought them, and I don't think this is fair. Hence I want my money back. I urge everyone to do the same.
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
With that particular declaration under oath in the Grokster case in mind, I hope this comes to court.
The only question that remains then is "which of the two statements is perjury?".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Ripping a CD that you own to an mp3 player, is just like your CD player reading the cd ahead into a buffer. Are the RIAA saying that CD players with buffers are illegal?
Downloading music or movies that you don't own is illegal, I agree with them there.
However this "belief" is just horse poo poo. Is their goal now to kill the MP3 player market and drive us back to portable CD players? It would seem so.
I realize that this is their opinion, hopefully they won't convince a judge/senator/congressman that they are right.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
I'm a little confused. When I buy a CD, am I buying the physical disc, in which case I surely get the right to do with it as I see fit, or I'm buying the right to listen to the music, in which case the media that it's on should not be relevant.
I can fully understand (assuming that I am only buying the rights) that I can't legally copy the music and give/sell that to someone else, but I'm no longer clear on what 'buying' a CD actually buys me.
Well, here in Canada, a media levy has been charged on recordable media -- ostensibly to compensate the artists for 'stealing' their music. The only music I have has been purchased legally -- I have every single original CD. Somehow I doubt under their funding formulas any of the artists I listen to are actually being compensated under this levy. It probably all goes to the big mega acts; the smaller artists and the ones who have been long dead are probably ignored from this formula.
The only things I burn to disk are data, and mixed CDs for playing in my car. As far as I'm concerned, I've never stolen anything from them, and they're the ones stealing me by charging me this levy under the assumption I must be comitting theft.
They will never convince me that I don't have right of first sale on my CDs, and they will never convince me that I can't buy a CD and then listen to it on whatever device I wish to.
Someone really needs to stop this absurdity with the recording industries.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
[rant]
I understand copyrights and piracy and all the issues around all that. That isn't my focus for this article...
If it is indeed the RIAA's choice to try to prohibit putting one's music on one's portable, this latest thing is lunacy. It IS fair use to listen to one's music on alternate devices that one owns!!! Every artist I know (including myself) WANTS people to listen to their music!!! How is this latest thing going to PROMOTE music? How is it going to create or keep FANS interested?
I don't normally get hot under the collar about this stuff, but this isn't very smart on their part. When you've bought a CD or bought tunes from some service, the listener has every right to want to listen to it! Putting a copy on a portable (or putting it on a backup CD) doesn't amount to piracy - it is normal use.
Many of us give away music in an effort to try to get people to discover our sounds. MOST of us WANT people to jam/groove/listen to our music while doing things that are important to fans (music is a part of daily life for most folks, and me, personally, I'd like to be a part of that - my musical friends feel the same way) and portables are a ubiquitous means of "being there."
You CAN'T forget about fans, RIAA! Period!
[/rant]
Sorry for the rant post, Slashdot. I feel better now.
A Passionate Independent Musician
The retail price of a CD includes the money siphoned in the distribution channel. The IP value of a CD (performer + composer + producer) is about $5, the residual is marketting + distribution. Apparently CDs follow the movie industry model of loading the cost into the distribution channel, where it is safe from the grubby hands of artists. These essentially free distribution channels are a direct threat to this model.
Being able select individual tracks permits you to pay only for the oats, leaving the turd on the road; thus killing another well established profit model.
I'm their target audience - I actually bought my music collection, which is somewhere over 1500 cd's, not to mention my small vinyl collection and cassettes from my youth. Also, I (was) a regular buyer from iTunes. My collection of *legitimately* purchased music is large enough that it doesn't fit on any available iPod. Yet because of all of this crap, I have stopped buying any music that is from an RIAA-affiliated label, and I have to imagine that others have done the same. It is obscene to say to me that I can't backup the collection I paid some $20,000-$25,000 on over the past 15+ years. They are nauseating, greedy, evil corporate whores.
:)
Vent vent vent...
-jake.
I have a bunch of music I treasure that is NOT availiable on CD, and is NOT readily availiable, or availiable at all, on CD any more. RIAA is just so full of crap that they rot the floor behind them wherever they go.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You're not buying the CD, you're buying the rights to play the music. Furthermore their mechanisms DO prevent you from copying CDs (unlike their argument goes). See the Sony case.
Therefore:
If you're not allowed to make your own backups then the music industry should accept that providing you have proof of original purchase they have to provide you with replacments on demand when the original gets lost, scratched or whatever.
Lets not even get into what happens if (like me) you emigrate to a different country and your whole DVD collection (hundreds) won't play anymore because of the purely artificial restriction enforced by region code.
Congress needs to ammend the copyright law to allow ANY distribution to yourself.
Although this may kill most "Software Licenses" since most of them rely on the "Distributing from the CD to your computer" (or "Distributing from the Hard Drive to the Memory") to add ungodly amounts of restrictions "over and above" copyright law.
Your whole point about CDs costing less than iTunes is also bunk. Nearly every album on iTunes that can be bought as an album costs quite a bit LESS than any copy I can find in the stores on CD unless they are clearencing them out.
Your DRM tin foil hat theory is disturbing.
The more the RIAA does this kind of petty crap to try to claim moneys they may or may not have gotten, the more I want to download music illegally, just out of spite. Heck, I download any Metallica song I see as a result of the Napster thing, and I don't even listen to much Metallica anymore (they've sucked donkey toes since that black album with the snake on it)
But back to my point - this is a capitalistic country (mostly, friggin gov't.. but I won't get into that here) and in such an economy the consumer can best voice displeasure with a company by no longer purchasing their goods. We, in the US, take this power too lightly.
Stop buying CDs. Tell the RIAA you don't like their business practices by reducing their bottom line.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
Isn't a CD just a container for PCM WAV files? Isn't a CD player a type of computer? Next, you are allowed to backup hard drives. You are allowed to compress hard drives. They contain software and other protected media, don't they? Why would it follow that we could not back up a CD and even compress it? Most software is okay to install on one computer at a time. My CD's are in storage once I rip them. The ripped songs all fit on my Archos. I listen to them thru that in my car, thru headphones, or attache via USB to any PC and listen there. What is the problem?
I figure you were going for cynicism there, but currency is physical property, not intellectual property. The laws treat them differently, and for a very good reason.
CDs are non-physical now? Cool!
Good to know that walking out of a store with a dozen under my coat isn't theft of physical property.
Or perhaps I should stand in the middle of the shop aggressively rubbing the shiny side of their stock with a sheet of 50 grit while explaining to the irate staff that "replacements are readily available at affordable prices"? Hey, it ain't physical damage, you know!
And have nowhere to turn.
They've sued their customer base.
They've spent millions on ineffective marketing campaigns.
They've pushed labels to cookie-cutter their music and bands.
Now they wonder how they're going to raise profits?
If they move forward with restricting our right to backup a flimsy media so that we can listen to the music that we've purchased the right to listen to, then we the community need to fire back.
ie - counter-sue the RIAA/MPAA on the grounds that we pay money for a product that is INTENTIONALLY DEFECTIVE.
They produce a products that are brittle, easy to break. They produce products which require a scratch free surface to play properly, yet the products are made of a material that scratches almost by air flowing over it. They produce products which illegally extend copyright, by making the encryption never ending.
I'd say there's enough there to start a massive world-wide class-action lawsuit and force them to refine their product, at no additional cost to us, so that they are scratch resistant, and have an encryption method that turns itself off after the legal copyright limit.
If they cannot do that, then they'll have to retract their position, and allow us to make backups of their defective products.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I'm getting the sense here that the RIAA and the online downloadable music companies which are going to be their major source of future revenue are running at cross-purposes here.
The downloadable music companies like Apple have always tried to argue that deep down we knew there was something "wrong" with using the illegal download services... that it was not just marginally illegal, but immoral. The RIAA's ever broadening definition of what violates their copyright keeps cheapening that concept.
To be honest with you, once affordable legal downloads became available I started switching over to them for convenience sake, and also for the added bonus of not being in violation of any laws. But now the RIAA comes along and says "guess what, that Culture Club CD you bought 10 years ago and ripped onto your hard drive because you don't own any audio CD players anymore... that was a crime". Well, at this point I'm breaking the law anyhow. So my choice is to either shell out a few grand to replace ever cassette tape and CD I ever bought with iTunes, or to keep playing the ripped, but legally owned stuff, knowing that the RIAA is still going to bitch.
But you know what? This probably does have an effect on how I'm going to buy music in the future. If the RIAA is going to argue that downloading a bunch of Bjork songs off a P2P service is the legal equivalent to going to Best Buy and buying the CDs and ripping them to my hard drive... there's no good reason for me to shell out the money anymore, is there?
If you can't listen to music anymore without being a criminal, then why pay for the priviledge?
I'm going to be honest here, nothing would make me happier than for the RIAA to hire someone who comes up with an absolutely foolproof copy protection mechanism that totally and completely prevents backing up CDs, and whatever other copyright protections they want to build in. Let the entire industry adopt that copy protection scheme. Nothing will kill their CD game faster than giving them exactly what they want. Let them put the product they want on the market, and people will flock, in droves, to alternatives. One of the main reasons people haven't migrated is because of ineffective copy protection that allows them to make copies and the like. Close down all the loopholes and suddenly electronic music distibution systems start looking a lot more promising. Sure, the RIAA will then start focusing more on electronic music distribution, but at that point the previous paradigm has already cracked and IMO their credibility regarding the benefits of their copy protection plans would have taken a huge hit.
Happy goldfish bowl to you.
So I buy my favourite SONY label music artist's CD.
I then buy a Sony Vaio PC.
I then buy a Sony CDR Burner.
I then buy a Sony CD-R AUDIO 50 pack.
I then use my Sony Vaio to make a backup of my Sony Music CD with my Sony CDR Burner onto a Sony CDR AUDIO cd which I then play in my Sony Car Radio.
And now they say I'm not allowed to do this? They ENCOURAGE it. They give us all of the tools to do it. Hell they even make those bullshit "audio" CDRs for it.
The EFF should just walk into the court room with all of the above "devices" and submit them as evidence.
Currency as physical property is a piece of paper with text on it. The reason you cannot copy it is that the government holds the intellectual property rights to it. If you physically stole currency from a bank vault, that would be theft of physical property. If you counterfeit currency, that's not physical theft.
Hard currency (e.g. silver coins) is another matter, and in that case it is real physical property with inherent value, but that's a very small proportion of currency these days.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In fact, you can bribe your senator with an iPod.
Seems that someone noticed that Senators with iPods ask tougher questions when faced with "content industry representatives" at hearings. This group is asking people to donate money to buy your senator an iPod. From their site:
Plus, we're going to pre-load each one with examples of the cultural richness made possible by sharing and collaboration - public domain content, Creative Commons content, and audio messages about the importance of balanced copyright policy. It will be engraved with the words "listen to the people." And it will arrive at each Senator's campaign office with a letter of explanation and a list of all the people who helped pay for it.
Interesting idea.
SharkJumper
Why can't DRM tie the purchased song or movie to a particular owner? Why can't playback devices also tie themselves to the same owner? Once that is accomplished, devices can play any song or movie their owner has legally purchased. Why is this so complicated? Later CZ