legality question

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Original post by Subconscious
I was thinking about something earlier. Listening to the radio is legal, correct? And making a tape of a live radio broadcast is legal too, right?

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Maybe... I''m not sure on exact US take on things, but recording (be it tape or VCR) is usually allowable for personal use only. This may just about cover loaning a tape to a friend, but when you move into making copies and distributing to the great unwashed you''re definatly on shaky ground.

Mmm... Indeed, shaky ground.

I think the real bottum line is though:

If your not causing them to lose money, they don''t care in the slightest. If they are losing money, they may go out of the way a little to stop you. Lets say this really was a loop hole to the law though, and they started losing LOTS of money because of it (or atleast think they were; brings to mind the "I wasn''t ever going to PAY for your music in the first place, so how are you losing money?" approach) they will put all the money and power behind them and try to stop it. Lets not forget that money often leads to corruption and less that fair means of getting what they want.

It also comes down to your moral belief. If your looking to be legal, for the sake of being a upstanding citizen then thats great, and you would have to see if that was legal or not. If your simply worried about not getting cought downloding music, go ahead and continue using the P2Ps because nobody will ever catch you unless you are uploading music. They only way they COULD catch you downloading is if you got it from one of there servers that they were monitoring and grabbed your IP off of. Now lets think, its there server, they put the music on, and they hold the copyright to the music; you downloaded from this server. Noting is illegal about this. Thats like me saying, "Hey, this is my car and I''m going to give it to you for free, no catch." You accept, then I turn around and sue your for stealing. Entrapment. Any sophmore in law-school would eat that for breakfest and move onto something thats actually worth spending there time on.

quote:

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Original post by Subconscious
I was thinking about something earlier. Listening to the radio is legal, correct? And making a tape of a live radio broadcast is legal too, right? I''m also fairly sure you can legally pass the tape along to your friends as long as you don''t sell it or anything. So if you were to make an mp3 recording of a radio broadcast, could you legally distribute it as long as you''re not selling it? And if so, let''s say you have XM satellite radio and create the mp3 directly from the signal, would that still be legal? You could get some pretty decent quality off that.

I guess what I''m really wondering is the exact wording of the laws the RIAA is suing people with, and why they don''t seem to apply to radio broadcasting.

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Sharing among friends has fallen under fair use for years. In order for it to be considered fair use, you can''t be causing too much harm. There are some other considerations, but this is the big one for this case. If you make an MP3 recording off an XM satellite signal [assuming its possible...I''m not familiar with the system and that may be pretty hard to do], and give it to all your friends then its no big deal. You''ve only got a couple friends. But if you put it up on the internet, and thousands of people download it, then its a big deal. That''s what shut Napster down: the scale of the actions, not the actions themselves. Fair use questions are decided on a case by case basis, so you''d have to go to court to find out for sure whether or not you''ve broken the law.

So there''s the legal answer.

CM

Highly intriguing question indeed.

Consider the following (note that this is taken from EU law, I don''t know for sure how the US/RIAA handles this. But it can''t be that much different):

* You have the right to tape publicly broadcasted material. The royalities have been paid by the broadcasting company (financed through advertisment and/or pay-TV). This is not fair use, it''s a given right you have, by law (at least in the EU, I''m not sure about the States).

* Recording applies to analogue and digital transmissions. Direct digital taping of eg. music is technically supported (my satellite receiver has an SPDIF output I can directly plug into soundcard/DAT/CDR/DVDR/minidisc/etc. I regularily digitally record songs from SAT radio, giving me an impressive legal mp3 collection (that I do not share over the internet).

* Although intended for personal use only, it is considered fair use to exchange those recordings with your friends and family. Worldwide distribution on the net is obviously illegal, since the original royalities paid by the broadcaster are generally for a single country/state only.

Logical conclusions to draw:

* Swapping recorded material with someone who had theoretical access to the broadcasting in the first place has absolutely no effect on the income of the record industry: he could have just taped it himself. In the case of a public, advertisment sponsored broadcasting channel, this group may very well include one or several countries. Sharing taped songs between members of this group is therefore fully legal. Things are very different with pay-TV, of course.

* Consider high quality digital satellite transmissions. A taped MP3 and a ripped MP3 of the same song downloaded from Kazaa & co, will contain the very same material (ignoring compression differences). Therefore, if someone downloads a song from Kazaa that was also broadcasted over digital SAT radio, there will be no difference to taping. Yet, the RIAA has stated several times, that not only sharing, but also downloading is illegal. Logical fallacy.

Basically, the current copyright laws applied to digital content are totally out of date. The original laws were never intended to be used in our modern networked society, where the same information can come from so many different sources. New laws need to be drafted, and obsolete dinosaurs like the RIAA need to be removed.

Just my view on the controversial topic.