I forgot to do the morning roundup last night, so I had to wake up early this morning to do it. First: it was surprisingly easy! I guess having two weeks’ worth of sleep saved up makes it possible to get up before 9:30. Second: morning news is even worse than I had imagined.
A moment ago CNN’s American Morning is engaging in some legal analysis of the recent noise over whether ripping your own CDs to mp3 is illegal. It’s true that this is a bit confusing. For instance, although I respect Mike Masnick’s analysis of the issue, I disagree with his assertion that the RIAA only objects to users ripping CDs to shared folders. It’s always seemed to me that they tolerate such activity, but consider themselves to be doing so thanks to their basically generous nature (and not, of course, out of fear of a crushing backlash from consumers and the courts). One commenter points out that Sony lawyers have referred to ripping CDs as “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy.'”
But I do agree with Mike that the media’s treatment of these issues has been abysmal. And even granting that the legalities can be murky, CNN’s treatment of the story was stunningly bad, revealing that their legal correspondent is not only completely unacquainted with the relevant issues, but couldn’t even be bothered to spend a few minutes on Google reading up on them prior to going on the air.
But I have never heard it happen that you buy something legally and then you put it on your own computer to make it more portable, I think so many people do this, and now you’ve broken the law to the tune of thousands and thousands of dollars.
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I don’t see it as really being legally any different from using your DVR and downloading some shows, some Oprah shows as I do, and putting them on your computer so that I can watch them and make them more portable.
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You know it’s my job to keep up on the legality of things, and I thought it was legal as well.
…For the viewers out there the takeaway needs to be you have to be very careful. Let’s wait until we find out the ruling on this case before you continue downloading these CDs.
No! The takeaway is that we should grab torches and pitchforks and march down to the courthouse. Or write our congressmen, anyway.
I suppose it’s nice that big media outlets are paying attention to these issues. Still, this is pretty piss-poor. The scope of fair use in the digital age may not be as immediate a concern as health care or stagnant wages, but it affects nearly every consumer in the country. People are randomly getting caught in an industry’s death throes, and suffering serious financial losses as a result — none of which benefits anyone except the attorneys involved. It’s a real problem and we should all be thinking in a deliberate way about how we want to solve it.
