{"id":2066,"date":"2007-12-29T10:13:09","date_gmt":"2007-12-29T15:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/29\/drop-that-compact-disc-music-thief\/"},"modified":"2007-12-29T10:13:09","modified_gmt":"2007-12-29T15:13:09","slug":"drop-that-compact-disc-music-thief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/29\/drop-that-compact-disc-music-thief\/","title":{"rendered":"Drop that compact disc, music thief"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re like me, you’ve ripped hundreds — perhaps even thousands — of compact discs, and copied the music files to your hard drive so that you can play them on your computer, or on a portable music player. You may even have done so on the advice of Apple, whose slogan “Rip, Mix, Burn” helped to launch iTunes. In any case, you and I are both common thieves, according to the latest gambit<\/a> from the record industry.<\/p>\n

As a recent story in the Washington Post notes, the RIAA has filed documents accusing an Arizona man of copyright infringement<\/a> for simply having 2,000 songs on his computer — even if those songs weren’t downloaded from peer-to-peer networks, but were copied from CDs that he legally purchased. According to the record industry’s lobby group, making a copy of a CD is theft, plain and simple. <\/p>\n

This isn’t the first time the industry has tried to make this argument. Earlier this month<\/a>, one of the RIAA lawyers in the case said that “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” And in the regular triennial review of the DMCA last year, the industry argued before Congress<\/a> that making even one copy for personal use is copyright infringement.<\/p>\n

As several people have pointed out<\/a>, this is a reversal of the testimony<\/a> that the record labels themselves put before the Supreme Court in the case against the Grokster file-sharing network. At that time, a representative of the industry told the court that “It’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, [and] put it onto your iPod.” Now, that same activity is apparently theft.<\/p>\n

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 says that the record industry could be the first industry to actually be destroyed<\/a> by digital technology, and he’s not the only one. Music insider Bob Lefsetz has made similar comments<\/a> — and at times like these, the impending doom of the RIAA and the traditional label structure seems almost inevitable. I have a feeling that this view<\/a> of the industry is not at all uncommon.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/b> The meaning of the RIAA’s comments in the current case is unclear (see Shelley’s comments below). As this post describes<\/a>, the wording in the record industry’s brief appears to have been changed to refer to files that appear in a shared folder. But it’s clear from other comments, as I note in this post, that the RIAA believes simply copying a CD is infringement — although it may not be prepared to argue that in this particular case.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’re like me, you’ve ripped hundreds — perhaps even thousands — of compact discs, and copied the music files to your hard drive so that you can play them on your computer, or on a portable music player. You may even have done so on the advice of Apple, whose slogan “Rip, Mix, Burn” … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Drop that compact disc, music thief”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}