No, actually, you’re not, at least according to the lawyers on the latest TWiL. The ripping of CDs falls under Fair Use while the resale of CDs is governed by the First Sale Doctrine and there’s not currently a clear understanding of how the two relate to one another in this situation, since First Sale clearly addresses the phono-recording as a distinct and salable object and most of the formal literature predates the advent of MP3s and the internet. There’s actually a service that will apparently let you mail them all your CDs and send back an iPod in exchange with all your stuff on it, after which they turn around and sell the CDs.
So, yeah - may be legitimate and it may not be, but it’s not a settled question, at least so far as the lawyers that I can use as resources have indicated.
As far as ripping software goes, I’m actually in the market for some of that and have a question about dbPowerAmp. My goal when I was doing my massive re-rip project was to get everything to FLAC for long-term storage and access and playback and junk (so all my home media, which is connected to my network, would use the lossless stuff) with MP3 copies for my portable drive to use at work and in any MP3 player I would buy to walk around with. The trick is, I want rich tag data on both of them (and I’m particular about my organization - like, for instance, I want to be able to search my collection for tracks on which Pep Love has appeared, which would span the “artists” Hieroglyphics, Zion I, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Souls of Mischief, The Shamen, The Prose, and his own name, but I don’t want to have to slap everybody’s name up on the title line on account of it’s ugly and I still want to be able to find full albums by the CD artist name). I tried the dual-ripper from dbPA a while back and everything was great until I figured out that it wanted to always rip both file formats to the same folder, which requires me to either write a little program to do nothing but walk through each folder and move the FLACs over to the place where they really go (along with correcting the filename to remove any garbage and whitespace characters), which I am too lazy to do. Long story short, is that, like, different now, so that I can have different base paths for each file type that then gets refined by Artist\Album, or am I just screwed here?
Completely agreed. It’s one thing to discuss ripping technology in the theoretical or for legitimate use (ripping CDs to an mp3 player) but given that people have been banned in the past for admitted game piracy this post from a game developer seems a bit odd. I assume this means you think it’s OK for people to keep a copy of Spore and sell the original, Soren?
Download a demo of the latest and try it out, I guess. I do MP3 as a separate conversion step (using the db Converter app), so I’m not sure how it’d work if you try to do both at once. I’d think it’d be possible, though.
I’m not going to listen to a 90 minute podcast to get an answer to this question, so I’ll ask you directly. Are you seriously suggesting that while ripping CDs is probably legal and reselling CDs is probably legal that this podcast is also arguing that ripping and selling the CDs while keeping the music is legal? Seriously? You find me a source on that one then because I’m pretty sure there isn’t one.
Hmmm. That depends. Do you mind if I “rip” a copy of Civ 4 or Spore, use a no-cd hack, and then sell my disks to someone else? I’d guess the answer is that yes, you would mind…
This is a far enough out there request for someone in the business that I’m left wondering whether your account was hacked.
Yes, that is precisely what they indicated, because the ripping and the selling are both independent acts. The position, which at this point is as valid as any other, since there’s no court case to date, is that when you purchase a physical musical recording, you’re paying for the hard phono-recording described in the decisions that form the basis for First Sale Doctrine and that the ripping of that music is protected use under Fair Use claims. There’s not actually a Beuller (EULA, but I like mine better) on music in the same way there is on a video game from what I can tell. Here’s the best case directly relating to the subject is still fairly shaky as an analogy (in specific, it deals with promo CDs and not releases and does not speak to the definition of “copy,” which it does not address because it deals specifically and only with the resale of promo CDs). There’s further discussion here on their ridiculous and unnecessary wiki entry presenting the counterargument, but I would say that so long as iPodMeister continues to operate without fear of a lawsuit (though their site reminds me way too much of Time Cube for comfort), you’re probably not on terribly wobbly ground.
My guess is that because one act is protected and the other act is protected, there’s a legitimate argument that you’re fine. I’m not the lawyer, though - those dudes are. They deal with the issue in the first twenty minutes if you want to hear people with Bar Association credentials; that’s just my summary, which I was curiously enough listening to when I saw this topic this morning.
iPodmeister charges a fee for their services in addition to keeping the CDs, right? That will probably get translated into your paying a license fee for the music when (not if) this heads to court. IANAL either, but I bet that’s going to be the defining question to nailing down this fair use loophole: are you at some point paying a license fee to use the music?
Nope. No fee. You send them the physical media, they send you a new iPod/iPhone and keep the media, which they can then resell. Sounds shady to me too, but they operate in New York and they haven’t been sued into the ground yet. The only possible way you could be getting an invisible license fee paid is if their company makes that payment (and I’m not sure how they’d do that, since there isn’t a mechanism by which I can just call up Columbia Records and tell them to bill my credit card fifty seven cents) and then covers that with whatever money they make off the CDs. Hell, maybe it’s a mafia operation designed to operate at a loss to launder money - I don’t know. I’m just saying that the podcast guys all ended up deciding that, yeah, when you buy that CD you can make a copy and then resell it. Maybe they’re wrong, though - it’s just five lawyers, and it’s not hard to find five lawyers to agree on any reasonable point.
I suspect, though, that the critical differentiation between the game argument being forwarded and the CD argument is that games come with a Bueller. CDs come with a short statement about how if you reproduce it you’ll be susceptible to prosecution under copyright law. They’re not forming their own agreement - they’re relying on presumptions already in place under the law.
Now, what iPodMeister DOESN’T do is make lossless copies. There certainly is a valid argument that if you rip a bunch of CDs to a lossy format like MP3, you haven’t made a copy under the definition outlined in First Sale, because you cannot reproduce the original. Maybe ripping to FLAC/APE/whatever would not be permitted but ripping to 500K+ MP3s would be? It’s a foggy area.
I suspect not, since circumventing the EULA (Note: Not any type of DRM, but simply the EULA) while installing would suddenly render software piracy wonderously legal.
This also brings up the bizarre spectre of it being illegal for you to give your friend an MP3 ripped from a CD, but perfectly legal to send him the CD so he can rip it himself after which he can return the CD to you.
I didn’t say it wasn’t bizarre. Sometimes laws are weird. I’m just saying that these guys’ argument was that the way the law is currently constructed, it’s not illegal. There’s an argument on the other side, certainly, but it’s not settled law.
I’m not sure what you mean by “circumventing the EULA” though - could you explain? My impression was that if you distribute software under a license agreement and a user takes exceptional steps to avoid clicking the little box that says he agrees despite the fact that your clear intention was that all individuals should click that box (as an aside, that would demonstrate an intent to recover the product, which has bearing on First Sale), you’ve still broken the rules. Am I misunderstanding you?
Eh, that’s arguable. Section 80, subsection 1 of the Copyright Act is what allows us to make copies of songs, but subsection 2 then explicitly exempts cases like where you then sell the original source.
Just to avoid any misunderstandings: I’m not the least bit interested in what Soren does for a living. If people think that’s an issue with this subject that’s their business. I’m simply asking (well, flabbergasted really) that copying a music (or game) disc and then selling said disk, while continuing to listen/play the music/game can in any way be considered anything other than piracy.
I’m not sure the disk space issue is so irrelevant. A lossless audio rip is about 28mb compared to a 6mb mp3 file? If my music collection suddenly went from 6mb per song to 28mb per son, I would be looking at 180gb of space instead of 40gb of space used. That’s not exactly irrelevant for a 300gb or 500gb hard drive.
