Legal Concern About Music Downloads/Sharing

Amie

Amie

Mac Convert for Life
I guess I'll post this here, since music is related to iPods (and I didn't see a more relevant topic).

I'm rather confused about the legal aspects of downloading, purchasing, copying and sharing music. I've heard that it's illegal to share music, yet it's perfectly legal to make a copy of the song that you've purchased from iTMS, for example, and put that other copy on your iPod, or even on another computer. It's also legal to transfer music from CDs and put copies of them on your computer and iPod. I mean, all that is pretty much common knowledge. People do it every day. That's we have iPods in the first place. That said, if all the above is legal, can someone please explain to me why it's illegal to make copies of music and share them with other people? Whether you're making a copy of the song for three of your own computers or one of your friend's computer ... what's the difference? You're still making copies. Period. I just don't get all the legal crap. It makes no sense.
 
It's because you bought the song for your use. If you copy it to your iPod, you are still using it. It's illegal if you copy it for someone else because that means that they don't need to purchase it as you did. It's therefore counted as stealing.
 
Shookster said:
It's because you bought the song for your use. If you copy it to your iPod, you are still using it. It's illegal if you copy it for someone else because that means that they don't need to purchase it as you did. It's therefore counted as stealing.
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Hmmm. Interesting. Consider this: CDs, DVDs and the like are very popular gifts. You purchase a CD (or DVD) for a gift for someone (birthday, Christmas, etc.). *You* purchased it. *They* didn't. Why isn't it illegal to purchase CDs and give them as gifts?
 
Yep, that just about sums it up: "personal" use.

If it's easier to think about it this way, then think about it as an "on-demand" kind of thing. If you purchase a song/album, then you can listen to it "on-demand" -- whenever you like. People can come over to your house and listen to you play the songs, but they can't listen to the song on-demand -- they're at your whim when it comes to that song/album. The minute you give them the ability to play that music on-demand outside of your household or immediate presence, you've broken the law, whether it's letting them transfer it to their personal iPod or making a copy of the CD or giving them the MP3/AAC files you created from the CD. Same goes for purchased music -- you can put the purchased music on up to 3 (or is it still 5?) authorized computers in your own household. It would be illegal to email or copy the file to someone outside of your household, even if you have some free "authorizations" out of the 3 allowed authorizations left.

The minute you give someone else not in your household the ability to play and manipulate that song on-demand, you've broken the law.

As for CDs and DVDs as gifts, that's perfectly legal -- you purchased it for them, so in the eyes of the law, the final holder of the media is the licensed person... you just paid for it in lieu of them. It's also legal because you, the purchaser, does not retain any copy of the CD or DVD once you give it away. When you purchase a CD or DVD and gift it to them, basically all you've done is hand them some dollar bills to go and purchase the CD/DVD themself in the eyes of the law.
 
it's a very gray area, which is why they find it hard to police it.

In australia, it is technically illegal to even rip you own CD to ipod. According to AU copyright law, copyright is infringed as soon as one alters the original format of intellectual property such as an audio disc (ie. AIFF to MP3).

of course no one is going to arrest you if you do.
 
Thank The Cheese said:
it's a very gray area, which is why they find it hard to police it.

In australia, it is technically illegal to even rip you own CD to ipod. According to AU copyright law, copyright is infringed as soon as one alters the original format of intellectual property such as an audio disc (ie. AIFF to MP3).

of course no one is going to arrest you if you do.
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I thought I read somewhere they just passed a law that made it legal??
 
If John "The Moron" Howard gets his way Australia will be inheriting the USA copyright laws, which would mean we would be able to make 1 legal backup of our own CDs. Hasn't happened yet tho, but I'm sure it will.

Doesn't sound like such a raw deal in that context, but as a whole it's a bad bad move IMO.

In the USA, recording artits (or perhaps just the companies) get a small cut out of blank CD-R sales. This was a response to the "backing up" problems the USA faces. I Australia, recording artists don't get anything from CD-R sales, so it isn't really fair.
 
So, if your playing a cd in the car made up of some of your Itunes purchases and your girlfriend hit's next track instead of you, technically she would be breaking the law? :confused:
 
Amie said:
Hmmm. Interesting. Consider this: CDs, DVDs and the like are very popular gifts. You purchase a CD (or DVD) for a gift for someone (birthday, Christmas, etc.). *You* purchased it. *They* didn't. Why isn't it illegal to purchase CDs and give them as gifts?
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You can buy a CD/DVD as a gift, but not keep a copy for yourself

Never tried giving a gift in ITMS so what happens then? the receiver needs a ITMS account?
 
mw84 said:
So, if your playing a cd in the car made up of some of your Itunes purchases and your girlfriend hit's next track instead of you, technically she would be breaking the law? :confused:
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If you want to get technical, one could argue that playing the CD in a place where others can hear it is breaking public exhibition laws, but that's just ridiculous. We could go on and on with scenarios that make the laws sound bizarre, but at some point you have to look at it with common sense.

As far as the law-enforcers are concerned, you can do whatever you want with a CD, so long as you don't copy it. It's really that simple.
 
mw84 said:
So, if your playing a cd in the car made up of some of your Itunes purchases and your girlfriend hit's next track instead of you, technically she would be breaking the law? :confused:
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Yes, she's breaking the law, and you'd better not let that cop behind you see her do it either... [/sarcasm] I hope you weren't being serious.

Like others have said, it's a gray area, but as I said in my first post, she's in your immediate presence and therefore it's not illegal. If you let her have that CD and let her take it away from you and keep it, then it's illegal. If you let her borrow the CD, that's legal -- if you let her copy the CD and keep a copy for herself, that's illegal.

It's really quite simple, as The Cheese said -- use your common sense. As long as you don't give your music to someone else, it's all pretty much legal. You can let your friends fiddle with iTunes on your computer and let them play DJ, you can burn a CD of your iTMS purchases and go on a road trip with your girlfriend and let her control the CD all the way, and you can have a house party and play burned music all night long for hundreds of people in the privacy of your home. You can even take your burned CDs over to a friend's house party and let them play them all night long.

Common sense dictates that as long as you're not giving those people copies of your music, it's legal.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Yep, that just about sums it up: "personal" use.

If it's easier to think about it this way, then think about it as an "on-demand" kind of thing. If you purchase a song/album, then you can listen to it "on-demand" -- whenever you like. People can come over to your house and listen to you play the songs, but they can't listen to the song on-demand -- they're at your whim when it comes to that song/album. The minute you give them the ability to play that music on-demand outside of your household or immediate presence, you've broken the law, whether it's letting them transfer it to their personal iPod or making a copy of the CD or giving them the MP3/AAC files you created from the CD. Same goes for purchased music -- you can put the purchased music on up to 3 (or is it still 5?) authorized computers in your own household. It would be illegal to email or copy the file to someone outside of your household, even if you have some free "authorizations" out of the 3 allowed authorizations left.

The minute you give someone else not in your household the ability to play and manipulate that song on-demand, you've broken the law.

As for CDs and DVDs as gifts, that's perfectly legal -- you purchased it for them, so in the eyes of the law, the final holder of the media is the licensed person... you just paid for it in lieu of them. It's also legal because you, the purchaser, does not retain any copy of the CD or DVD once you give it away. When you purchase a CD or DVD and gift it to them, basically all you've done is hand them some dollar bills to go and purchase the CD/DVD themself in the eyes of the law.
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Wow. If that's the case, I guess just about every person in the world is going to jail. I let my friend borrow a CD of mine for a few days to listen to in her car while on a road trip. I guess that makes me--and pretty much everyone else on this planet--law breakers. :rolleyes:

(I'm not rolling my eyes at you. I'm rolling my eyes at the stupidity of the technicalities of this assinine legal issue.)
 
it's actually very simple. each piece of copyright material has a dollar value.

every instance being used by a different person has to be paid for seperately. giving a track as a gift is ok, as long as you paid for his/her copy as well as your own. if you gave someone a cd to listen to, you wouldn't be able to listen to it untill you got it back.
 
Lt Major Burns said:
it's actually very simple. each piece of copyright material has a dollar value.

every instance being used by a different person has to be paid for seperately. giving a track as a gift is ok, as long as you paid for his/her copy as well as your own. if you gave someone a cd to listen to, you wouldn't be able to listen to it untill you got it back.
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This just keeps getting better and better. LOL
 
Amie said:
Wow. If that's the case, I guess just about every person in the world is going to jail. I let my friend borrow a CD of mine for a few days to listen to in her car while on a road trip. I guess that makes me--and pretty much everyone else on this planet--law breakers.
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No, it doesn't, because you lent her the CD -- you didn't retain a copy for yourself during this time, and providing she returned the CD to you without making a copy, no laws were broken.

It's really rather simple here in the states -- you can't give a computer to a friend and retain a copy of the computer for yourself as well -- just isn't physically possible without Star Trek-like replicator technology. The same applies to music, except the "physically impossible" part doesn't exist. That's where the law-breaking comes into play -- just because you can do it doesn't make it legal. If you give your music away, you should not retain any copies for yourself, just as with any other physical thing.

I think that's why so many people find it hard to grasp the idea that sharing music (in the sense of giving a copy of it to someone) is illegal -- because it's so damn easy to give it away and retain a perfect copy for yourself. If it weren't so damn easy to do, it might make thinking of it as illegal more "graspable."

I don't want to spark a debate about how the RIAA is greedy and music sharing should be this and shouldn't be that, but think if you created something -- a piece of software, for instance. Someone purchased it for $15, then copied it and gave it to 20 friends. You made $15 for supplying 21 people with the software -- not fair, right? You should have been paid $15 x 21, not $15 x 1. It gets harder to wrap your head around this idea when the artists complaining about those extra free 20 copies are already making a million dollars a year, but that's how it is on both a large and small scale. You get paid for every person/household that wants your goods, and not just a few that paid for it and shared it to the rest.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
I don't want to spark a debate about how the RIAA is greedy and music sharing should be this and shouldn't be that, but think if you created something -- a piece of software, for instance. Someone purchased it for $15, then copied it and gave it to 20 friends. You made $15 for supplying 21 people with the software -- not fair, right? You should have been paid $15 x 21, not $15 x 1. It gets harder to wrap your head around this idea when the artists complaining about those extra free 20 copies are already making a million dollars a year, but that's how it is on both a large and small scale. You get paid for every person/household that wants your goods, and not just a few that paid for it and shared it to the rest.
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Well said.
 
It is, perhaps, pointless to try to make this stuff actually make sense. In a general sort of way, and perhaps more so with some companies than others, the recording industry would like to make you pay as much and as often as they can. There are schemes (re)proposed from time to time to create recordings that can only be played some small number of times, even! The digital revolution has created many many many new ways to slice this cake, and they've been slicing it like crazy. At least twice in the last five years, CDs have been released that would more or less permanently damage your player--not that anyone wanted that, but they were willing to risk that in order to, they thought, prevent you from copying what you'd purchased. Those recording formats quickly get withdrawn, but the fact that they come up again surely shows that sense is just not part of this mix!
 
JackRepenning said:
It is, perhaps, pointless to try to make this stuff actually make sense. In a general sort of way, and perhaps more so with some companies than others, the recording industry would like to make you pay as much and as often as they can. There are schemes (re)proposed from time to time to create recordings that can only be played some small number of times, even! The digital revolution has created many many many new ways to slice this cake, and they've been slicing it like crazy. At least twice in the last five years, CDs have been released that would more or less permanently damage your player--not that anyone wanted that, but they were willing to risk that in order to, they thought, prevent you from copying what you'd purchased. Those recording formats quickly get withdrawn, but the fact that they come up again surely shows that sense is just not part of this mix!
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*confused look*

Huh? CDs released that will damage your CD/DVD player? Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis?
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
I don't want to spark a debate about how the RIAA is greedy and music sharing should be this and shouldn't be that, but think if you created something -- a piece of software, for instance. Someone purchased it for $15, then copied it and gave it to 20 friends. You made $15 for supplying 21 people with the software -- not fair, right? You should have been paid $15 x 21, not $15 x 1. It gets harder to wrap your head around this idea when the artists complaining about those extra free 20 copies are already making a million dollars a year, but that's how it is on both a large and small scale. You get paid for every person/household that wants your goods, and not just a few that paid for it and shared it to the rest.
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Right on the money!

I'm a little uneasy about sharing my music with people and stuff mainly because my brothers are in a band (check them out!) and over the last 6-8 years, they've spent countless hours recording/practicing, etc. It's a very long and involved process to create an album and distribute it. So I'm more sensitive to artists because of this, especially because most artists aren't rich and famous.

But when it comes to DVDs/movies...well that's another story :D
 
It is, perhaps, pointless to try to make this stuff actually make sense. In a general sort of way, and perhaps more so with some companies than others, the recording industry would like to make you pay as much and as often as they can. There are schemes (re)proposed from time to time to create recordings that can only be played some small number of times, even! The digital revolution has created many many many new ways to slice this cake, and they've been slicing it like crazy. At least twice in the last five years, CDs have been released that would more or less permanently damage your player--not that anyone wanted that, but they were willing to risk that in order to, they thought, prevent you from copying what you'd purchased. Those recording formats quickly get withdrawn, but the fact that they come up again surely shows that sense is just not part of this mix!
Click to expand...

They're not so worried about CD players but more concerned about CD drives in computers, as more and more computers are shipping with CD and DVD writers built in. Sony was recently reprimanded for including spyware software (Windows only, I think) with some of their CDs that would report usage activity to Sony's headquarters. The problem is that these companies are often quicker to sue you then you are to sue them ;)
 
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