Sony BMG Says Ripping CDs is Stealing

LKM writes "Sony seems to think we should not be allowed to rip CDs we own to our iPods. In fact, doing so is stealing, and we should all re-buy songs, preferably one copy for each device. Says Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG: 'When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song. Making a copy of a purchased song is just a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'.' I guess somebody should tell Sony about all the devices Sony produces that allow this stealing to occur!"

Comments

Suppositions

[Rob T Firefly]

Says Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG: 'When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song. When an individual makes a statement like that, I suppose we can say that person is completely out of their moldy gourd.

Re:Suppositions

[Stonent1]

So that means the people who bought Sony MD Walkmans in the early 90's before file sharing was common place were supposed to buy a separate set of CDs for it? Did it say that anywhere on the box? No!

Re:Suppositions

[Gr8Apes]

I think that's the purpose of releases like this, to make the previous unreasonable statements look like acceptable alternatives.

We should actually draw the line in the sand and tell the entire RIAA to get bent.

Re:Suppositions

[dintech]

Aren't these people supposed to go through their PR department before they're let loose on the public with their wild rantings?

Re:Suppositions

[MysteriousPreacher]

Now take those out-of-time backwards people, and propose to them the notion that they cannot legally publicly perform a traditional, popular, well-known song without paying someone for the privilege. They'd probably all consider that asinine and offensive. Yep, that's a classic of people disregarding a silly law, quite correctly in my opinion. I've no problem with the song being protected for a reasonable period of time, but the idea that a song written in 1935 should still be protected by copyright is a bit of a stretch.

Disk caches can be pretty big. Sometimes, when I wind back to the beginning of a track to hear it again, that entire track will be played from cache. Was that an illegal copy I just played? Good example. Caches could probably be taken in to account when writing laws, but technology is changing too quickly. Either the laws will try to keep up, becomming horribly complicated in the process, or we need less restrictive laws in the first place. If copyright law in the UK simply allowed a reasonable level of fair-use, we wouldn't have found ourselves in a situation where many thousands of iPod/mp3 player/minidisc owners were unwittingly breaking the law just to listen to music that they purchased. Any law that regulates the behaviour of the average man needs to make sense to them. If the majority disregard the law or don't see why it should be there, then the law probably needs to be examined very closely to see exactly who it's serving.

So I guess everyone was stealing...

[lightblade]

...when they were making mix tapes back in the 80's? If copying is copying then I don't see the difference...

Re:So I guess everyone was stealing...

[PopeRatzo]

According to the new rules of the corporate culture, we are stealing every time we expect some product or services for our money. We're stealing when we expect to use an iPhone the way we want to use it. We're stealing when we assume "unlimited" bandwidth means "unlimited" bandwidth. We're stealing when we borrow a book from the library or from friend. We're stealing when we pay for health insurance and then actually use it. We're stealing when we expect the government to do something useful with our tax money like provide health care to children instead of providing security services to oil companies in Iraq.

We're supposed to shut up and pay.

Re:So I guess everyone was stealing...

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I think the RIAA would be perfectly consistent and argue that people were stealing in the 80's when they made mix tapes. Keep in mind that in those days that few people were on the internet. CD-R didn't exist. The only way consumers could copy music was to do so via low quality cassette tapes. The RIAA wasn't happy about home taping from day one and fought a losing battle against it, but since practical concerns (time involved in duplication, generational quality loss, and cost of media) made it impractical for people to engage in large scale duplication of music at home, they just turned a blind eye to the idea that a few people would share music with their friends via cassette tapes. However, choosing not to prosecute some guy for making one or two tapes for friends doesn't mean that they ever agreed that the practice was legal. It just would cost more to prosecute than it was worth.

Re:So I guess everyone was stealing...

[realdodgeman]

According to the new rules of the corporate culture, we are stealing every time we expect some product or services for our money. We're stealing when we expect to use an iPhone the way we want to use it. We're stealing when we assume "unlimited" bandwidth means "unlimited" bandwidth. We're stealing when we borrow a book from the library or from friend. We're stealing when we pay for health insurance and then actually use it. We're stealing when we expect the government to do something useful with our tax money like provide health care to children instead of providing security services to oil companies in Iraq.

We're supposed to shut up and pay.

And the surprise is?

This is what happens when companies are allowed to make the laws. Most corporations have one goal: Make more money. The higher price and more times you pay for the same product, the better. Capitalism can be good, competition is the best, but it needs to be regulated, as has been proven time and time again.

When all the major record companies "agreed" on using lots of cash on DRM and MAFIAA, they knew that they were going to screw their customers. But they also knew that people wouldn't stop buying music. But this is where they stepped wrong. RIAA can't stop piracy, and DRM can't either.

Now they are making more and more desperate statements (like the example in this article), to try to compensate. Fortunately it won't help, and they will at last be forced to listen to their customers. DRM-free music is getting more popular every day, and the music industry will soon realize that they have to follow that example.

Let this be a warning for all corporations, that eventually they will get burned if they screw with their customers.

Re:So I guess everyone was stealing...

[king-manic]

I think the RIAA would be perfectly consistent and argue that people were stealing in the 80's when they made mix tapes. Keep in mind that in those days that few people were on the internet. CD-R didn't exist. The only way consumers could copy music was to do so via low quality cassette tapes. The RIAA wasn't happy about home taping from day one and fought a losing battle against it, but since practical concerns (time involved in duplication, generational quality loss, and cost of media) made it impractical for people to engage in large scale duplication of music at home, they just turned a blind eye to the idea that a few people would share music with their friends via cassette tapes. However, choosing not to prosecute some guy for making one or two tapes for friends doesn't mean that they ever agreed that the practice was legal. It just would cost more to prosecute than it was worth.

Of course they sued the cassette recorder manufacturers, lost, and set a president that copying is fair use. They've been fighting to prove that distributing over the internet is legally different (which is likely is). So while putting songs on kazzaa might be illegal ripping CD's has already been set as fair use. So her statement ignores history. It's inconsistent with the legal history that exists. She might want to go and buy off American politicians but you need to make sure that doesn't happen.

Re:So I guess everyone was stealing...

[Firethorn]

Not Bizarro World at all. More complex regulation usually translates into 'loopholes'. Not to mention, once you start getting complicated with the regulations, you're more likely to see corporate shills writing the regulations to put even more loopholes that you could drive a mac truck through; assuming you have the money to hire a modest staff of lawyers and accountants to pull of the tricks.

To make your example a little more realistic - it'd be like reducing traffic accidents by simplifying the road system. Eliminate five & six way intersections, for example. Go to on-ramps and limited access/exits for highways. Don't have a lot of varying speed limits in a given length of road. Some will disagree with me, but going to traffic circles rather than red lights or stop signs can reduce accidents.

As for laws, you'd be looking at eliminating stuff like requiring hand signals for turns, having a person walking before the car holding a torch and ringing a bell. Honking your horn before making a turn. Stuff like that.

In that case...

[Corporate Troll]

.... I didn't even bought a license as you claimed before. I bought nothing at all. So what exactly did I buy from you?

Next Step

[Anonymous Coward]

"We market CDs to allow the customer to sample the music. Every additional time the customer listens to the CD translates to lost sales for us. We will make sure that legislation exists to charge the customer to prevent people from stealing and unfairly gaining from our copyrights."

Yours sincerely,
RIAA.

Re:Next Step

[An ominous Cow art]

Your joke takes it to the extreme, but I truly believe that these people wouldn't consider "listening" to be "stealing", but they might consider "remembering" to be stealing. After all, the act of remembering a song or movie is tantamount to keeping an unauthorized copy of the work in your head.

The ??AA's Holy Grail would be a technology that allowed people to pay money to experience their products and walk away with a good feeling about it (to encourage future sales), but at the same time render them unable to remember the specifics (to encourage paing money for the same thing again).

Re:Next Step

[bentcd]

And after that...
Dear sir or madam;

We respectfully request that you cease and desist from listening to our music. Technically, we're probably already there. When playing music, you are sending electrical signals down a wire - this is a copy of the music. Then you induce vibrations in a speaker corresponding to the music - another copy. This then produces sound waves to travel through the air - a third copy. The sound waves hit your ears and induce neural impulses that are transmitted towards your brain - a fourth copy. Finally, you build an internal cognitive picture of the music in question, which makes for the fifth and final theft.

When you have bought a CD, you are /possibly/ allowed to hold it in your hand, look at it and wistfully try to imagine what the music might be like if you were permitted to actually listen to it. But I may be overly optimistic. After all, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Well if it's all stealing

[Anonymous Coward]

Then I might as well just skip buying the cd and go straight to downloading it from eDonkey. Seriously, if it's come to buying one copy for every device I want to listen on (including one cd for my car and one cd for my home stereo) then fuck it, I am just going to steal it from the get go. Suck on it, Sony.

ripping is stealing....

[k3v0]

but installing rootkits is okay

"...I suppose we can say he stole..."

[Reality Master 201]

I suppose I can say that woman is a terrorist and an enemy of the United States, and should be thrown into Gitmo forever.

Making a supposition, however, isn't the same thing as proving one, nor does it constitute a good prima face argument in its favor.

Sony might have missed this. . .

[kimvette]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act

Well I think Sony Electronics might have heard of this (betamax anyone?) but Sony BMG hasn't? Aren't they part of he same corporate entity, or at least owned by the same corporate entity? Are the board members suffering from multiple personality disorder or something?

Sony vs. Universal?

[phiwum]

What a change from the Sony vs. Universal Studios case, when Sony argued (and won) that copying television programs for time-shifting was a legitimate exercise of fair use.

That was back when Sony regarded themselves as a technology company rather than a content provider, of course.

Much more damaging

[Cracked Pottery]

is the tendency of record companies to promote crap. The idea that Sony BMG thinks I shouldn't be allowed to commit CD's I have purchased to a library on my hard drive for convenience is outrageous. The major labels should know stealing when they see it, they have ripped off enough artists over the years.

I think it would be nice to see the record cartel shrink even more as people spend more time listening to live music or playing it themselves instead of being passive consumers of recorded music. Folks might also consider patronizing independent artists.

If it's wrong, Sony should give back copying levy

[WillAdams]

which they've received for blank tapes and stop producing blank media suitable for copying music as a sign that they feel such actions are wrong.

William

More unneeded bad publicity

[therufus]

People in the general public are starting to get sick and tired of hearing what they can and can't do with music. No wonder the rate of piracy is growing on a daily basis. When you have the chest-beating RIAA and it's affiliates telling people they should pay more and more for music (which is substandard these days IMHO, but thats another topic), people are more likely to look for other resources to acquire the music they want. I believe it's starting to turn into the 'path of least resistance' theory, relative to spending money on music. If you keep jacking prices up, telling people they can't use their purchased item the way they want to and blame it on illegal file sharing software, people are going to start using the illegal file sharing software due to the fact they can't afford the product anymore.

Can you imagine if you were to use the metaphor of eating. If you hunger for food, and buy food to eat, you will eat it when you want. If you were suddenly told that you could only eat during certain hours and couldn't share your food with others who can't afford to eat, you wouldn't be to happy. Suddenly, there is a place where they stole the same seeds (metaphorically speaking) to make the same food but they gave it away for free. The people you used to buy the food off would go out of business right? So they try to bend the laws and make new ones to protect something that should be free (or at least paid back to the farmers) from the thieves.

Here is the problem with that analogy. The farmers work hard to make the food we eat, but they get paid tiny amounts of money for their goods. The store puts a huge markup on it and rips off the consumer.

Do you see the pattern?

If the RIAA, BMG, SONY, UMG, EMI, etc keep on proclaiming to the masses that they own the music, they will be killed off like the dinosaurs they are.

I certainly hope I stayed on topic for that.

Time for a lie down methinks.

Copying is besides the issue

[Jugalator]

Sony should not really focus or speak up on copying. Copying is moot nowadays as the properties are not physical, but intellectual. A computer may copy a song as soon as you transfer something bought on iTunes to your iPod. Should that be an illegal action? Of course not! But still, you did, indeed, copy a file you had downloaded. Is there a difference here in what one might do with a CD? No, because in both cases, you make another copy of the product for playing in e.g. a mobile device.

The only straw that's left for Sony to grasp at is not about copying, but about breaching licenses. But that would seem to apply more to DRM'ed material to me, than physical CD's. You do click through a license agreement when installing iTunes and there is also the DMCA to disallow decrypting DRM protected media. But what about CD's? I don't enter even something as little as a click through contract, and neither do I need to (normally, thank god) decrypt a CD to rip its content.

This Sony rep may "suppose" whatever he wish, but that's to me merely his opinion, not law or anything. If it's considered fair use to play a single intellectual property for own use on your own devices (and I can't really see how it could possibly be anything but that), then this should be OK. Let's not involve the copying part so much, because a computer copies files a lot, even sometimes when you don't know it or it's not 100% apparent to the user, or not necessarily a user initiated action. It copies a lot of things to RAM too, which is quite literally transfering material from your hard drive to another hardware device.

Involving copying will just make matters more complex to sort out and understand for their customers and is, besides, quite irrelevant. Who cares how many copies you make and to where? IMHO, what only matters is whether you breach a contract. And in that case, I can only agree with them that the copyright infringement here is if it's causing a financial loss to the copyright holder.

But then -- that would mean that, in this case, Sony would need to honestly believe an artist lose money on someone who carries an owned CD to the car stereo, which is quite crazy. Since that also means a user isn't purchasing two copies for playing it on another device.

Not news.

[SatanicPuppy]

Remember, there is a difference between Sony's hardware division that makes stuff that plays music, and Sony's music division that signs artists, and distributes music.

The hardware people are reasonable, they want their stuff to be able to play everything, and record everything, and they want it to work 100% of the time.

The music people just want you to buy their stuff over and over and over. They don't care if you EVER listen to it.

It's a big corporation, and all the parts aren't always working in the same direction, so don't throw down on the people who make stereo equipment, and the DVD-W's you're using to flawlessly copy movies, just because the music people are douchebags.

Re:Not news.

[cez]

It's a big corporation, and all the parts aren't always working in the same direction, so don't throw down on the people who make stereo equipment, and the DVD-W's you're using to flawlessly copy movies, just because the music people are douchebags

Umm... no thats the exact reason to "throw down" on those people who make stereo equipment with contradiction to what the douchbags at Sony BMG say. These asshats need to be leashed in and one way is totally holding the rest of the corporation accountable. When they don't have their head up their asses, they reply to one thing, and one thing only: money.

Speak with your wallets and speak to the shareholders; across the board.

Sony execs should be self-policing their other divisions, period.

Re:Not news.

[pipatron]

The hardware people are reasonable, they want their stuff to be able to play everything, and record everything, and they want it to work 100% of the time.

Ahh.. so that's why they always invent their own formats for cassettes, memory sticks, interconnectors, etc... Or wait, no, I'm confused now.

Re:Not news.

[Just Some Guy]

Remember, there is a difference between Sony's hardware division that makes stuff that plays music, and Sony's music division that signs artists, and distributes music.

I'm not up on all this stuff, so could you tell me which Sony company makes money off hardware and which is the entertainment company, so that I can refuse to do business with the idiot corporation but still support the slightly less idiotic one? Because if you can't, in my opinion, that's exactly like giving me money to put in the checking account I share with my wife, but not liking her and refusing to give any money to her. It all ends up in the same place and will be distributed among the same people.

Re:It's a FAX

[mrchaotica]

No, better yet, the previous post's message, but written in white on black rather than vice-versa. Then you get the best of both worlds!

Why does Anonymous hate knowledge and freedom?

[Gary W. Longsine]

New rule! Only logged in users are allowed to request a citation.

"Citation, please?" is a lazy rhetorical technique which in online discussion forums like Slashdot has come to imply much more about the person asking the question than about anything else. It roughly translates from moronese to English as:

• I'm a moron,
• I disagree with you, but
• I'm too ill-informed to argue my side of the debate, and
• I'm too lazy to look up the resources which are freely available which would help me construct an argument, so
• I'm going to take the low road, and snidely suggest that you defend your argument, whereafter
• I'll assume that you are wrong and I am right because you didn't respond by falling all over yourself by quoting chapter and verse to me,
• but because I have this lingering sense that I might not know what the hell I'm talking about, I'll just post this retort as "Anonymous".

How about, instead of logged in Slashdot participants falling all over themselves to defend every other statement they make from Anonymous "show me a link" asshats, the asshats start reading a little more and learning about the world around them? Don't agree with what someone said? Look it up! You're using Slashdot, so you are already USING THE INTERNET. There are dictionaries and encyclopedias and actual laws, on the internet, mere seconds away from where you are now.

Google (fucktard)
Wikipedia (fucktard)
Urban Dictionary (fucktard) (particularly useful when somebody calls you a name you haven't heard before)
Encyclopedia Dramatica (fucktard)
United States code (aka "the law" for U.S. residents)

If you care enough to post, then please devote the five or ten minutes that it might take to research the topic and post your own link refuting the statement that you don't agree with. I'll help you get started, here: U.S. Copyright Law. You don't need a degree in law to read and understand well written laws. If you can't read and understand a law, that's a pretty big hint that it might be broken in some way. Finding relevant sections of the code can be challenging, but Google can be quite helpful with that.

Look it up!

Out of print CDs?

[scottsk]

What about all the CDs which are out of print, that the record companies will not sell any longer? How do you buy a copy of a CD that is not for sale? I thought that was the whole point of fair use, to have a way to preserve media that isn't being sold anymore.

Re:Sony is not welcome in my wallet...

[Insightfill]

Sony probably thinks that is stealing too. They are contacting the politicians they own right now to create a law making it illegal not to buy their products.

We can laugh about this, but isn't that really what a media tax is? A fine for NOT buying the copyright material through normal channels? (Additional burden - assumption of guilt: you pay the fine on media that MIGHT be used to hold a copy of copyrighted material. If you use the media for data, or even as a coaster, you still pay that "fine".

ahhhhh!!

[pakar]

Now i finally understand how they calculate the amount lost to piracy!

Re:Contact details

[russotto]

If the fear of goatse stops me from clicking on links, the terrorists have won.