Ripping CDs illegal???

FOXNews.com - Lawyer: Ripping MP3s Illegal, Grounds for Lawsuit - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News


This is getting f-ing out of hand!

And now for the bi-polar ying to that yang;

FOXNews.com - Warner Music to Sell DRM-Free Music Via Amazon - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News


Get these guys some friggin lithium pills...

Re: Ripping CDs illegal???

The defendant is accused essentially of distributing music via a music sharing service. It appears the RIAA is using every tool to win their case, including asserting that even ripping CDs is a copyright violation.

What they're not doing is targeting someone for ripping CDs per se.

If the RIAA wins this case and the claim is supported that ripping is not covered under Fair Use, well, that will be interesting.

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As Dave said, the RIAA is simply making every argument imaginable. Lawyers do this not because every argument they make is correct or even worthwhile, but because failing to make any argument in a US court is the same as conceding it, and you won't get to assert that argument in the future.

When the court eventually makes a ruling, the reasons will be articulated, and the extent to which each argument made by the RIAA contributed to the court's decision will be deliniated.

In other words, even if the RIAA wins, the likelyhood of this court case setting the precedent that personal-use ripping does not fall under fair-use just because the RIAA made that argument, is pretty much zero.


EDIT: Yay, Warner!

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Here's the part of the whole CD-copying thing I don't get:

The RIAA allows the sale of music-only CD-Rs that have a price premium to supposedly cover lost royalties on new disc sales. Who's to say that a person who uses these discs still won't get sued for copying?

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I thought estoppel could only apply between the same parties, if they happened to go to litigation again? And if it was an issue in point in the first proceedings?

I.e. just because RIAA didn't allege that ripping per se was illegal in a Kazaa-type case, where distribution is the main complaint, shouldn't bar them from raising it in another case against another defendant where the complaint now is against ripping per se. Or is this just American legalese CYA?

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Seems the problem is that when he ripped the CDs to his computer he saved them to a shared folder.

Lawyering aside, the RIAA is not trying to prevent ripping to one's own PC for "fair use" purposes (loading to one's own iPod, burning a copy for car stereo, etc.).

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You're right. Thanks for being more clear. I didn't mean to imply that failing to raise an argument would preclude a litigant from raising that argument in litigation with other parties, or in unrelated litigation with the same parties. I just meant that the RIAA would be precluded from raising it in this particular case should other arguments fail to carry the day.

In this case, I think that any reasonable person would conclude that if the RIAA wins, it will be the "file sharing" argument that carries the day, not the "unauthorized ripping" argument. But strange things sometimes happen in a court room, and a plaintif can't really know in advance which particular arguments a judge will latch onto and find persuasive. So plaintifs (and defendants, to be fair) often use a "shotgun approach", arguing anything and everything they can think of. And if you play the litigation lottery often enough, you might eventually get lucky and find a judge who will find your most obscure argument persuasive and issue a ruling which sets a landmark, though potentially absurd, precedent in your favor.

But I don't think that will happen here.

Re: Ripping CDs illegal???

Check the article again;

Re: Ripping CDs illegal???

It's fascinating that RIAA would allow its attorneys to make an argument like this, given the the immense popularity of the ipod and its clones. I'd bet that most CDs sold these days are immediately ripped for this kind of use. Even suggesting that it's theft is really an insult to their buyers. Unfortunately for the music industry, todays buyers have a lot of other things competing for the attention that used to go to music. Things like the internet, movies on DVD, video games and cable TV. None of that stuff was a factor when I was younger. I actually have some young friends who have never bought a CD. It's not that they're downloading, they just spend all their time on other entertainment (mostly gaming), and don't care about music. I certainly don't understand it, but it seems to be a trend.

Watching this whole debacle, I sometimes wonder if RIAA feels that the CD is essentially done as a format, and is trying to get whatever they can from people. I've often read that the majority of acts make most of their money from touring, so they could just as easily offer songs for nothing on a web site to get them out there, or post videos on YouTube. They could also do like some acts I've seen, and offer a crappy copy free, and a lossless copy for a fee. I've purchased music this way, and thought the idea worked quite well.

I'm sure the latest moves by Radiohead and NIN on the internet must have them losing a lot of sleep these days...

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I don't think so. I think the RIAA feels that they are entitled to continue to force consumers to buy CDs forever, no matter how irrelevant the format becomes.

Here's Gizmodo's take on an upcoming Wired interview with an RIAA exec.

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Wow, that link reminds me of the old Dilbert saying: "A paradigm shifting without a clutch."

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Until music is downloadable in a DRM-free lossless format rather than mid-bitrate mp3, CDs will still be relevent to many music lovers.

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After all of the record labels' crying during the last decade, it is impossible to feel anything but disdain for them after I read that Doug Morris quote.

I really, really, more than ever, miss the old days of Mp3.com, when it was about indie music.

It's become a really telling, sad day when the record labels' highest paid talent is their lawyers.

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True enough. As a music lover, I thought I'd never embrace mp3s. But I discovered that when I'm in my car, because of the noisy enviornment, the difference between mp3s and CDs, while still noticeable, just doesn't matter. Soon after that discovery, the convenience of a portable digital player won me over.

Magnatune sells indie music in DRM-free, lossless format (.wav), and the artists get half the money. I love having a site like that to support and buy music from.

Deutsche Grammophon sells DRM-free mp3s at 320kbps, the highest bit rate available (I think), whereas most music stores sell mp3s at 128kbps or less. The difference in quality is stunning. I can tell you from experience, they are almost indistinguishable from the CDs.

Everything else I listen to is ripped from my own CDs at 320kbps, so while I now embrace mp3s, I at least limit myself to the highest quality mp3s possible. Does that still make me bad?

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True enough as far as it goes, but you know the CD people are kicking themselves for putting out an unprotected format while the DVD guys are laughing their heads off. You can picture a convention where the DVD guys mock the CD guys all the while giving them wedgies.

Behind the scenes, the music industry has to be planning how to wean the public off of open CDs and onto someting they can protect via DMCA. It'll be a sad day, but it's coming. They could do it now of course, as this case hints at, but the reaction to Sony giving it a try was enough to postpone it for a while. This is just a salvo to claim they have the right to do it.

There's nothing we do in ripping CDs that we wouldn't want to do with DVDs if we could. Most of us would love to rip our (purchased) DVDs to an iPod-like device that could be attached to our HT. But DMCA (or cost for the licensed version) prevents that as a commodity product.

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I'm sure you're right, but I wonder if the paradigm for the music world has changed so much that the old music industry is inevitably going to die out. They had it made in the old days when you signed an act, paid them peanuts for the music, sent it out over radio and reaped the profits. The bands could make their money touring. Of course, things were simpler then, with fewer genres of music and fewer bands.

Now, most genres have splintered into multiple subcategories. Most of these have smaller, but loyal, fans. Probably not enough to do an old style marketing campaign to, and probably not enough for mainstream radio. On the other hand, fans have the internet, so the power of word of mouth has grown exponentially. They can also put videos on YouTube or MySpace and sell their music via online retailers or their own websites. I've seen a move in this direction by artists such as Prince, and (as I mentioned above) Radiohead and NIN, as well as numerous smaller bands.

I have read at least one editorial (don't remember where) suggesting that the artists would be better off simply giving away the music as advertising for their concerts. I doubt that this is totally feasible for a lot of artists, but if they make as little on recording contracts as they appear to in a lot of cases, it may not be the worst idea. After the record company's and agent's cuts, you often wonder how some of the old bands made any money at all. Of course, outside of the mainstream rock, a lot of them didn't, at least on albums. Look at genres like country or the blues, where even famous artists still complain about being robbed by the record labels.

The whole idea of copy protection kind of makes me laugh anyway. It's almost inevitable that it will be cracked, and sooner rather than later. Too many very intelligent and determined people do that sort of thing as a hobby. I'm not saying it's good that they do, but it does make the process rather futile. It's analogous to making it illegal to breathe air. You can do it, but there's pretty much no chance it will work.

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At home, (almost) all my CDs are ripped to FLAC, which I use with my wifi Squeezebox. Why lossless FLAC? Because it saves space compared to WAV while still allowing for tagging (which WAV can't do) and lossless is the only way to reconstruct the original CD at CD quality as needed. Plus I can transcode to any format at any time without having to pull the original CD out of storage.

I also maintain a mirrored mp3 directory structure for use on portable players (LAME setting -V 4 -vbr-new, or slightly better than FM quality), for use where the needed sound quality isn't as great, like in a car as you mentioned.

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Wow, Joe, that's a really nice system you've set up!

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Thanks, but I'm just piggy-backing on the work and ideas of others, and the Squeezebox is a great piece of hardware.. The forums on the Squeezebox website are full of helpful people. Even the creator/maintainer of FLAC, Josh Coalson can be found there supporting others. My setup isn't even all that fancy, but it works well for us.

My wife loves it, because it's an easy system to setup and use, and we find that we are listening to much more of the collection than when we had all of our CDs on shelves right next to the CD player.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the Squeezebox server software, which has a web browser interface, can send an mp3 stream to any media player (WMP, WinAmp, etc.), so anywhere my laptop has an internet connection, I can access my entire music collection on the server at home. Like in a car, mp3 quality is "good enough" on a laptop computer with built-in speakers.

So yeah, it's a nice setup. Interestingly, I've bought more CDs in the year since I bought the Squeezebox than in the previous 5 years combined.

Re: Ripping CDs illegal???

Probably true. To be fair to "CD people", CDs came out at a time (early to mid-80s) when the 700MB capacity of the disc exceeded that of the few hard disks there were, there were no CD-burners at all, whilst MP3 didn't really exist at the time either. So there was no reason to 'protect' CD -- it was no different from vinyl in that sense, it couldn't be copied and the one copy you purchased had to be played to listen to the music. In contrast, by the time DVD was being developed (mid 90s), hard disks by then had about the same capacity as CDs, so it didn't take a huge leap to see that DVD's 4.7GB could be matched by a hard disk soon.

Still, ripping a DVD for playback on iPod (or similar) would probably still take place less opten, since it's hard to watch something 'on the move' -- you can't watch a show whilst driving, for instance, whereas you can always listen to music or anything that is audio-only. Likewise if walking down the street, running, cycling etc since you also need to look where you are going.

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> True enough as far as it goes, but you know the CD people are kicking themselves for putting out an unprotected format while the DVD guys are laughing their heads off.

There weren't any protected formats back when the CD was invented.

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I do pretty much the same thing (although in my case it's 224kbps VBR via LAME). If the CDs were copy-protected to prevent me from ripping them to MP3, I would stop purchasing them. My listening habits have changed to where portability is very important to me.

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Do you have a link to this site? this might be the "digital jukebox" I've been wanting for all my MP3's, and rather then hijacking this thread I'll check the site out

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Transporter & Squeezebox Wireless Network Music Players - Every room deserves a soundtrack

And you're not really hijacking the thread, since it's actually trelevent to the subject.

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I pretty much rip anything new immediately, and then transfer to my Zen Vision W. I carry it, take it in the truck, ride with it on the bike...I have all my music wherever I go.

"True enough as far as it goes, but you know the CD people are kicking themselves for putting out an unprotected format while the DVD guys are laughing their heads off. You can picture a convention where the DVD guys mock the CD guys all the while giving them wedgies."

Yeah, as we know, transferring DVD content to portable players just isn't possible. I wouldn't have the slytest idea how to do such a thing.

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I just wanted to mention that Logitech announced a new addition to their Squeezebox family at CES that is designed to compete with SONOS. It is a displayless Squeezebox that uses a wifi-enabled remote with LCD screen to use as display. The remote interacts directly with the server software over a network, so it can control any and all Squeezeboxen on the network.

I don't need one for my setup, but it is a pretty cool design. And just like the server software, there are plans for 3rd party plugins.

They also announced a new Harmony remote that looks pretty sweet.

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They'll have a hard time winning that one, given the ruling in RIAA vs. Diamond Multimedia.

That was the court case where the RIAA went after a MP3 player (the Diamond Rio). They brought the suit under the AHRA (which had been touted as a law to protect vendors from record company lawsuits), claiming that the Rio was required to conform to SCMS (a primitive DRM that prevents making a second generation of digital copies). (It was not.)

The judge noted that the AHRA was designed to exempt devices like the Rio from the SCMS requirement. The judge also noted that format-shifting onto devices like the Rio was a paradigmic example of Fair Use (making reference to the Supreme Court's Betamax decision).

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Okay; I have to ask a question. Unless one is sharing files via P2P or usenet how the hell will anyone even know what one has on their pc? What about people who lock down their pc's?

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If the RIAA had their way, and they are trying through Congress, they'd be putting a trojan on every computer to see what music you have "illegally" stored, even if ripped from your own CDs. I highly doubt their lobby will be successful though.

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Sony already tried to do this without the sanctification of legislation by publishing CDs that installed rootkits on computers without the users' knowledge or consent. After infurating the public, Sony eventually recalled the CDs and issues a "fix" that purported to remove the rootkit, but actually exposed the computers to far worse security risks by allowing code to be executed on user's computers from anywhere on the Internet.