Dude, i really want to believe you about this. You seem very certain of yourself, so if you have some evidence that this is, indeed, the law, i’d love to see it.
That’s different from downloading MP3s of the songs, especially since MP3s are often ripped from CD.
This is more likely to be clearly under fair use as format shifting. Take a turntable with a line-out, capture the music as a .wav file by feeding it into your soundcard (or multiple .wav files depending on if you have any audio-editing software), and burn the .wav files as an audio CD. You have taken something you own and converted it into a different format and should be no different from me taking a CD off my shelf and encoding it into any audio format I like.
Look, your explanation makes complete sense to me, and i really want to believe that this is acceptable.
But if experience has shown us anything, it’s that copyright law and rulings have become exceedingly confused and, at times, apparently inconsistent in the digital age. It is not unusual for one activity to be deemed OK, while another, apparently very similar activity is called into question. While it is true that format shifting has, like time shifting, generally been sanctioned, those things have generally referred only to physical copies owned by one person. So, i can time shift by recording a show on my VCR, or format shift by ripping a CD to my computer’s hard drive or mp3 player.
What is not so clear to me is whether i can format shift by copying someone else’s digital media, as in the case in rfgdxm’s example. If there has been a ruling on this specific type of format shifting, or a ruling that this falls under the general umbrella of acceptable format shifting, i’d be very happy to read it.
I’m not sure that (logical)format-shifting could be argued to be fair when there has been a general improvement in fidelity or function; If I own a movie on VHS, does that mean I can fairly/reasonably copy a friend’s DVD of the same movie and watch that?
I have seen legal interpretations that have said courts would find format shifting in the example of LP->CD to be illegal. However, to the best of my ability to search, this has not been tested in an actual court. I really think that it is becoming close to a violation of the GQ rules to absolutely assert that something is legal or illegal without a clear cite provided within the same post.
In the case of… let’s say “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” [old version] the DVD has new content including interviews of the stars decades later that would presumably not be found on an older VHS release.
It’s pretty reasonable to imagine that ripping a DVD with those interviews would not constitute format-shifting.
I don’t know what, exactly it would be, but I suspect that it would likely be more legally shaky than format-shifting, which this thread has not as yet seen cite to show legal or illegal.
And regarding my original post in this thread… jeez. I guess my guarantee that this gets locked is probably broken.
What would an appropriate guarantee redemption be? Do I have to buy the OP a stack of blank CDs?
I’m embarassed to have been unable to come up with an easy cite, but I don’t believe a remastering job is subject to protection under US law. One of the best remastering engineers around, Steve Hoffman, has the answers somewhere on his site, but I can’t locate the exact spot. I might be mistaken, however.
An easy analogy, which may, however, be inapt, is that which compares remasters to standard-notation transcriptions from recorded tunes. In both cases, tribute is due to the owners of the sourced material. However, if I choose to “transcribe” a jazz solo by copying from another printed source, and pay tribute to the songwriter, publisher, et al., I need not pay a dime to Joe “Music Literate” Blow who bothered to take the tune off such-and-such an album originally.