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Ask Slashdot: How Do I Scrub Pirated Music From My Collection?
An anonymous reader writes "I tried out Google Music, and I liked it. Google made me swear that I won't upload any 'illegal' tracks, and apparently people fear Apple's iCloud turning into a honeypot for the RIAA. My music collection comprises about 90% 'legal' tracks now — legal meaning tracks that I paid for — but I still have some old MP3s kicking around from the original Napster. Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own. I wanted to find a tool to scan my music to identify files that may be flagged as having been pirated by these cloud services; I thought such a tool would be free and easy to find. After all, my intent is to search my own computer for pirated music and to delete it — something that the RIAA wants the government to force you to do. But endless re-phrasing on Google leads to nothing but instructions for how to obtain pirated music. Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
There is no way for anyone else to identify which of your music files are legal. All that is possible is to identify that certain music files are illegal (because they contain certain "watermarks" that indicate they come from a source that you could not have legal access to). And even there there is room for argument. For example, it is not clear how the courts would rule on a case where you downloaded a copy of a file that you owned on CD rather than ripping it from the CD. There is some question as to whether possessing music files that were illegally copied is actually illegal.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The audio data and subcode (track timing) data are split into two separate streams in the CD drive. The CD standard allows sync between audio and subcode to drift by (as I understand it) up to one sector, or 588 samples. This phenomenon is called "rip jitter". CD-ripping tools will overlap reads within a single rip by a sector or two to correct for changes in this drift, but there are still hundreds of offsets where the whole rip can start. Thus there are hundreds of distinct "basic 128Kbps rip[s] with a common MP3 encoder", each with a different starting rip jitter because the CD drive signaled a "start of track" in a different place within the sector.
The illegality of downloading track of a CD you own has yet to be proven.
In which jurisdiction? In the United States, see UMG Recordings v. MP3.com.
In the UK copyright law does not even allow recording TV shows to watch later, it is merely tolerated
This is incorrect.
s70, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, entitled "Recording for the purposes of time-shifting", provides that:
The making in domestic premises for private and domestic use of a recording of a broadcast ... solely for the purpose of enabling it to be viewed or listened to at a more convenient time does not infringe any copyright in the broadcast ... or in any work included in it.
He doesn't need to prove anything. They have to prove he stole/downloaded/copied it.
If you still have the pirated[sic] songs, you continue to infringe.