Accrington Web - Record industry says downloads to PC are illegal

Quote:

Originally Posted by steeljack (Post 510084)

ok , everyone knows sales of CDs have slumped over the past couple of years and the recording industry has been going after folks transfering recordings online , now they are saying it is illegal for you to copy your own legally bought CDs to your PC and copying a blank and sharing it with friends , how they are going to manage it I don't know . as the article below mentions folks have been copying records and TV programs for years without any copyright infringement ....be interesting to see what happens

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When you bought a record, cassette, (audio or video) CD or DVD you owned the object but not the content on it. You could sell your record, cassette, CD or DVD without a problem though, unless you made a copy to retain for yourself. The same applied to computer programmes. You owned the media but not the content. It was the same with books or magazines. You owned the media but not the content.

The copying of recorded music, TV programmes etc has always been a breach of copyright, irrespective of the fact that people did so. It was nothing more than an urban myth that you could make a copy of your own records for your own use. It was still a breach of the copyright laws. But it has also been impossible to police so the music industry didn’t even bother to try, unless the copy was sold and they found out.

I remember the brouhaha when reel-to-reel tape recorders first became available to the public. Record companies were up in arms because they claimed that the public could buy a record and tape it for their friends. Of course some did but most kids did what I did and recorded the Top Twenty on Radio Luxembourg and listened to it until the next Sunday.

When the Amiga A500 first came out it was possible to load a game and then copy it back to a floppy. Then Commodore got wise and did something to the newer Amiga’s to prevent this from happening. Then eventually the games makers put some sort of copy protection in the programme. But then with X-Copy you could copy those floppies.

The games on cassette tapes for the Spectrum 48 could be copied using a Hi Fi twin cassette deck. Then when the Spectrum 128 came out with it’s own built in cassette you had to tweak the position of the playback and recording heads slightly on your Hi Fi cassette recorder to make a perfect copy.

For decades the music industry has charged outrageous prices for records and tapes when copying was not so easy and made a fortune in the process. But now it is payback time and they don’t like it.