I recently was looking into DVD burners, and noticed that the "digital millenium act" or whatever it's called, severely limits what you can legally burn. But the restrictions seem pretty strange and far-reaching. Am I correct in thinking that the following acts were legal (and widespread) in the 80s/90s? - making a tape copy of your friends' Thriller record - video taping The Terminator off HBO - filling a VHS tape with Cheers episodes - filling 6 audio tapes by recording the Pogues A to Z from a Boston radio station I seem to remember these things even being encouraged through cetain promotions. Some stations even played "full album sides" just for at-home recorders, didn't they? And VHS manuals came equipped with detailed directions on how to program your machine to record movies, best settings, best tapes to buy, etc. But now, am I correct in thinking that it is illegal to: - Burn a copy of your friend's White Album cd - Burn a copy of your friend's The Terminator dvd I just don't see a real difference here. It's also strange that you can legally digitally record an entire West Wing season via TiVo, but apparently can't digitally record the West Wing First season via dvd burner. What's the deal? IMO, these "personal use" questions should be totally separate from the distribution issues raised by file sharing. I can see how a threshold is crossed when you can give a copy of the white album not just to say, 3 friends, but 3 million friends. Clearly, massive digital "sharing" changes the meaning of that term, but it shouldn't affect the old definition.
These were never legal, if you were going to tape the program and watch it over and over again. If you just taped it to watch it once at a later time (so called "time shifting"), that would be legal. Way back in the early days of Betamax, Sony was taken to court for making a tool that promoted program piracy. They argued that the VCR was mostly a time-shifting device. They lost. Sony had to pay a license fee to cover lost costs due to the expected piracy of their customers (much like you have to pay a royalty right now if you buy blank "music CD-R" media). I don't recall if other VCR manufacturers had to do this as well - it's been a while since I studied this. Yes, this is also making a new copy of already existing content, and is illegal. The TiVo is a time-shifting device.
Re: Re: Question About "Fair Use" What's ironic is that it's much easier to distribute TiVo'd content to milliions over the internet than with video, and digital content can conceivably be kept permanently unlike VHS tapes that degrade over time.
The problem is that "Fair Use" is not an actual legal concept, in terms of intellectual property. Technically, I'm pretty sure it's not even legal to make a backup copy of your own CD for your own use. This is a gray area that needs to be fixed, badly. Of course, knowing Congress, it will instead be fixed badly. I think Rick Boucher proposed legislation that codifies fair use rights, but I don't know if anything ever became of it. Further complicating the issue is the claim by some P2P defenders that anonymously sharing copyrighted works with 60 million people falls under "fair use." All this will be in the book I haven't started writing yet on digital music... Later, COZ
Re: Re: Question About "Fair Use" I half guessed that was the case, but then it seems strange that I remember a moderator on a West Wing fan site a few years back who openly was offerring to send people VHS copies of all Season 1 episodes. Heck, maybe she got prosecuted.
Few more questions: Is it illegal to: a) rip a CD onto your hard drive, if you do not share or burn into onto a disc? b) create a mix CD from your CD collection for your own personal use? c) create a mix CD from your CD collection to play at your next party? d) Copy your music onto your iPod or other devices which you can copy music to, but not from?
it's fair use to rip burn make back up copies for yourself it is not fair use to distribute it in any form trading tapes or recording off the radio wasn't a problem because tapes degrade. making digital identical copies however is a concern. there was a recent article on news.com about how recent cds have both wav files (normal cd formatted songs) and wma files so that you could copy them onto your hd or onto a mp3 device. because there are 2 copies, there is a dispute if companies have to pay writers and artists double http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5139762.html also, dvd jon who wrote the decss crack to play dvds on linux was sued by the mpaa and won because what he did was deemed 'fair use' in playing dvds on linux.
The answer to D is "Very Likely No", the answer to A, B and C are "Maybe". Current laws are kind of confused at the moment in dealing with digital media. The only thing you really have the right to back-up is comuter software. However, the chance of anyone really being upset by any of the above even if they knew about it are very slight, so I wouldn't worry about it. They don't seem wrong to me in a moral sense. Just know that the media companies would love to create formats in the future that would make A, B and C impossible to do.