What's legal when listening to your own music?

[scruffy]

@mephisto - Fair enough - I guess it's the DMCA I was thinking of that's really entirely broken. I was thinking of Jon Johansen writing DeCSS so he could watch DVDs in Linux, or (who was it anyway?) writing Hymn so he/she could listen to iTMS tunes on a portable MP3 player other than the iPod.

@ablack - This is something the RIAA doesn't want to admit happens. There was a debate a year or so ago, at Oxford, http://tirian.magd.ox.ac.uk/~nick/UnionDebate/ wherein Hilary Rosen (then CEO of RIAA) essentially denied that there was any evidence that people who download music frequently buy more, not less, of it - after a poll had just been conducted in the audience that showed it to be overwhelmingly true. Granted not an exhaustive study, but to conduct a poll and then immediately refuse to discuss the results...

I never bought so much music as I did when the first Napster was around.

[andychrist]

RIAA Sues the Dead

[Krevinek]

As far as fair use, there is a clause in the DMCA that specifically states the the DMCA does not otherwise restrict any use of the media that would fall under Fair Use. (section 1201(c) of the DMCA if you are interested.) It is a circular argument though in that we are again back to what constitutes fair use. So while fair use allows space shifting, DMCA does not allow encryption to do the space shifting in the first place. It is a gordian knot in the form of legal statute and case.

Well, the section of the paragraph that got snipped referred to a court case, (which I wish I could remember the references I had to it) where a case was struck down. This case involved someone being sued under the DMCA for taking a protected CD and ripping the tracks onto his MP3 player. This case (if accurate), would mean that space shifting has legal precedent above that of the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.

[Mephisto]

Well, the section of the paragraph that got snipped referred to a court case, (which I wish I could remember the references I had to it) where a case was struck down. <SNIP/>

Sorry could not resist. I must have missed that case though. I have seen quite a few threatened law suits but very few make it to court. None that I know of makes any reasonable precedent to base acceptable actions under DMCA. But I am not a lawyer and following this stuff is more a hobby than a concern.

The closest I can think of was when a copy protection software firm threatened the student from Stanford (?) with DMCA when he published a paper stating their copy protection could be bypassed by holding down the shift key. I do not believe it ever went to court. Ditto for the magic marker trick. Then you had the Skyrlov (so?), which is not a CD case but similar enough to have some validity. I think that was dropped as well but I am not sure.

[fryke]

Well, in a perfect world, I guess, I'd buy a license for a song (or a movie) with the right to play it - period. I then could use it on whatever device I wanted to use it on, I could re-download it should the CD it first came on break or anything...

[scruffy]

If you buy a CD - i.e. a disk without copy protection - you have the right to make backup copies, no doubt of that. It's only a DMCA issue if you're bypassing copy protection measures, which CDs by definition don't have. If it's copy protected, it's not a CD.

Similarly, I guess, if you make a backup of a DVD you own, even if it's CSS encrypted, you're probably in the clear as long as you copy the entire contents, encryption and all - then you're not circumventing any copy protection method...

[wicky]

...If you buy a CD - i.e. a disk without copy protection - you have the right to make backup copies, no doubt of that...

Not true in the UK.

[Krevinek]

Sorry could not resist. I must have missed that case though. I have seen quite a few threatened law suits but very few make it to court. None that I know of makes any reasonable precedent to base acceptable actions under DMCA. But I am not a lawyer and following this stuff is more a hobby than a concern.

The closest I can think of was when a copy protection software firm threatened the student from Stanford (?) with DMCA when he published a paper stating their copy protection could be bypassed by holding down the shift key. I do not believe it ever went to court. Ditto for the magic marker trick. Then you had the Skyrlov (so?), which is not a CD case but similar enough to have some validity. I think that was dropped as well but I am not sure.

Skylarov's case falls under electronic documents, which it is harder to provide a case for space shifting here in the US. Space shifting for PDFs is equivilent to being able to print it in most cases. Which is /usually/ (not always) provided by Adobe's DRM, making their case against Skylarov more compelling in the US. Apparently in Russia where Skylarov worked on the software, the laws are that every DRM method must have another piece of software to strip the DRM to be legal.

The catch in these cases is: is your fair-use 'right' of space shifting being prohibited by the DRM? (time shifting doesn't apply, obviously) If not, then circumventing the DRM is a DMCA violation. If you cannot exercise your ability to space shift because of the DRM, then space shifting it probably will not be a DMCA violation. And remember folks, "If I don't see it, it isn't illegal" does apply in this situation. The people RIAA and the like threaten and persue are those who bring attention to themselves by then proceding to SHARE the songs on P2P and other blatantly suicidal actions.

Silencing the student falls under another (bone-headed) clause in the DMCA which makes it illegal to discuss security problems in copy protection schemes in public. Hence the attack on the people who figured out a sharpie works in defeating DRM, since it fell under that clause.

Seriously, if the DMCA is disturbing (and it disturbs me as a blatant feed-the-suits set of laws), snail mail your congress reps and senators. If they understand that we don't like this, it will eventually get revoked once they realize it is a major issue. (It also means making it a major issue to people, a small grassroots campaign is dearly needed for this)