Copyright Violation

[Spexxvet]

The way I understand it is that it works like this. If you buy a "song", you can transfer that song onto any and all other media. If you transfer ownership of the original medium to someone else, you must destroy ALL copies that you made, in ALL media. So, I can buy the vinyl, copy it onto a cassette, reel-to-reel, and into my comuter, and burn a CD and put it onto my MP3 player - but if I seel the vinyl, I have to erase or destroy all the other copies I have.

This old article is all I could find, quickly, that supports my understanding.

"It's perfectly legal for you to make copies of your own music for your own personal use," says Robin Gross, EFF's staff intellectual-property attorney. "It's called 'fair use.' It's your legal right to do so, even if the copyright holder doesn't want you to."

So if you want to take all your Radiohead albums, rip selected tracks from each of them, and burn a mix CD for your own use, there's nothing wrong with doing so.

But when you make a mix CD for someone else, or create a CD from music downloaded from a source such as Napster, things get tricky.

If you were to pass your Radiohead mix CD along to a friend, fair use becomes debatable. If listening to a track on that mix CD inspires the friend to run right out and buy a copy of Amnesiac, then you might have a case for it being a fair use of the material, according to the EFF. Not so fast, the RIAA counters; that Radiohead CD is legal only if you also hand over to your friend all the legally purchased Radiohead CDs you used to burn it.

[dar512]

Well put, Spexx.