I am the second person to own this machine. The first owner only had it for a week or so, and returned it to the store he bought it from. I don’t know why.
I work at this store, and I found it sitting back in our claims area nearly a year after it had been returned. As far as the store was concerned, it was garbage. I made a lowball offer, and took it home.
Now it seems the only thing the first owner did with this 'puter was rip his entire cd collection into .wma files. Nearly 5GB of pure crap I have no interest in listening to remained on it’s hard drive when I bought it.
If I have missed deleting any of those files, am I violating copyright and/or guilty of theft? What if I listened to them first?
I was going to post this over in GQ, but upon review methinks this forum is a more proper location.
Nope. You haven’t made an illegal copy of someone elses intellectual property, nor are you making use of an illegal copy someone else made.
Nor did the original owner do anything wrong if he owned the cd’s he copied–fair use allows one to make copies of intellectual property one already owns–I use the cd burner on my pc to copy individual songs to make greatest hits cd’s to play in my car. It’s when you make a copy of intellectual property someone else bought or give or sell copies to someone else that you’re violating copyright.
If you deleted them as you say, no problem. You neither made nor kept an illegal copy of intellectual property you don’t already own. If, however, you decided you liked some of the tracks and decided to keep them or burn them onto a cd before deleting them, you’re probably guilty of some sort of copyright violation. But based on your op, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Nope. You haven’t made an illegal copy of someone elses intellectual property, nor are you making use of an illegal copy someone else made.
Nor did the original owner do anything wrong if he owned the cd’s he copied–fair use allows one to make copies of intellectual property one already owns–I use the cd burner on my pc to copy individual songs to make greatest hits cd’s to play in my car. It’s when you make a copy of intellectual property someone else bought or give or sell copies to someone else that you’re violating copyright.
If you deleted them as you say, no problem. You neither made nor kept an illegal copy of intellectual property you don’t already own. If, however, you decided you liked some of the tracks and decided to keep them or burn them onto a cd before deleting them, you’re probably guilty of some sort of copyright violation. But based on your op, that doesn’t seem to be the case.