It is legal to copy/rip anything you legally purchased? One would think for sure TRUE right. But as it turns out the way I am reading the DMCA it states the acting of ripping is now illegal. Anyone care to shed some light on this?
Unreal.... I mean it just doesn't make any sense why you could not backup YOUR own data. Peronsally I feel like DVD's are like VHS now and they should all be digitally archived and ready to use via screen push buttons and not loading clunky discs into anything. Call me mr techy but its just how I feel. So what do in this case... You purchase downloadable movie and you make a "copy" onto a second hard drive. Are you breaking the law?
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA is now trying to claim making MP3s from personal music files and putting them in a shared folder is in and of itself a copyright infringement! On page 15 of its brief on Atlantic v Howell: “It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies … Virtually all of the sound recordings … are in the ‘.mp3′ format for his and his wife’s use … Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recordings into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies’…†So posts Recording Industry vs The People, quoting from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) online document. Interestingly, the fact RIAA ‘expert witness’ Doug Jacobson’s abilities have been seriously called into question notwithstanding, the Big 4 ‘trade’ organisation is still using him to present testimony. “Each of the 11 sound recordings on Exhibit A to Plaintiffs’ Complaint were stored in the .mp3 format in the shared folder on Defendant’s computer hard drive, and each of these eleven files were actually disseminated from Defendant’s computer. (See Jacobson Decl. ¶ 6 and Exhibit 1 thereto.). says the court paper.’ Source: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14294 Code (markup):
frankly the RIAA can suck my bawlz, "ill keep filling up my drive, the one that will disappear when the lawsuit arrives"
Yes, making copies for yourself of things that you have legally purchased is still legal. Here's the catch. The DMCA makes it illegal to try to circumvent copyright protection schemes. So if the CD you bought has copyright protection on it, then it is still legal to make copies but it is illegal to break the copyright protection. So while the concept of making the copy is legal, the act of making the copy is illegal (not because there you are copying, but because you asre breaking the copyright scheme). In the case listed above, what the RIAA was saying is that by placing the copies in a publically accessible folder where they could be downloaded from, the defendant made unauthorized use of his copies and contributed to their illegal distribution. It was not that he had copies, it was that he put them in his shared folder.