I thought that copyright law allowed you to make a photocopy of a book so long as it was for personal (not commercial) use. How is copying a library CD any different than copying a library book? Can someone point to a cite either way regarding the one copy for fair use / personal use idea? (I looked, but found nothing authoritative.)
You can make copies of works you own copies of for your own use, like copying a disc you’ve already bought to your computer. Fair-use copies, from works you don’t own, can be made of brief excerpts only. Otherwise, copying a library book you don’t own is a violation.
This is essentially what I was going to say.
No it’s not. But there are prior threads on this.
The guy is a thief. Not a bad reason to “defriend” anybody.
Nobody is upset that the author/publisher is losing the money that they would receive if every person had purchased the book instead of borrowing it. I say that there is nothing wrong.
When I was younger, TV was free. Radio was free. Telephones cost under $15 a month. Now it costs $35 a month for broadcast cable (apartments have no other options), a cheap phone plan is $60 a month, and you can’t find much on terrestrial radio aside from Rush Limbaugh. I think that the media companies that own the music are doing very well and that piracy is not as large an issue as they make it out to be.
It would never even occur to me to think of it as theft, or that there was anything wrong with it at all. In my day, making copies of albums was totally normal. I cannot and never will see making a copy of an album as “theft,” no matter what the law says.
I’ve done it.
I’ve done it too, when I was younger, but I eventually got annoyed that I didn’t have those albums on CD and ended up actually buying them (I have a thing for having the physical CD).
It is stealing, it is completely wrong, but it’s so widespread and common that if I were to get into an argument or defriend everybody who I know that’s done it, I’d be a hypocrite, I’d be annoying, and I’d have no friends.
Filesharing is a weird one for me - if a song is not available to me in my country (I like a lot of British pop, for example, stuff that doesn’t get released in Australia) I will illegally download the song until I can import a CD from overseas.
But I know people who have never paid for music, and that feels wrong to me. As someone said above, there are different levels of this type of thing.
Am I a shithead by proxy if I decide to donate all my CDs that currently clutter up my house to the local library after I rip them to my hard-drive? After all, I am doing it with the express hope to “share” the music with anyone who might want to hear it.
Gee, maybe I’ll just set them on fire instead. :rolleyes: I agree with the car racer above. And that weird guy who came in after him.
“No worse than online file sharing.” - which I don’t regards as “theft”, either. It may or may not be wrong, but I don’t regard something as theft when the person supposedly robbed still has what you supposedly took from him. IMHO, the main reason for calling it theft is to whip up moral outrage, because “unauthorized copying” just doesn’t sound as bad.
Huh, that is a great idea. The only thing I worry about is iTunes one day eating all of my music, or something. I don’t really trust iTunes.
You don’t back up your music files?
Yes, I do…though definitely not as frequently as I should. It’s just that having those CDs, in boxes, is extra insurance. And it’s not like tapes that go bad.
It’s a moot point, though, as maybe 85% of the CDs are my SO’s. (I kind of skipped the CD revolution and went straight from tape to mp3s). I wouldn’t give away his CDs without permission and he’d be very loathe to give them up.
Exactly. It’s like speeding - sure, going 5-10 miles over the speed limit is against the law and I can get in trouble (ticket) if caught, but it’s also something I do without thought every single day.
I just can’t get my panties in a twist over this type of crime.
Who cares. Really, if I heard it at a party I probably wouldn’t even remember about it the next day. Definitely wouldn’t remember if I wasn’t driving!
Doesn’t really bug me much. I wouldn’t do it myself but people do ignorant shit like this all the time. Hard to pile on. Reminds me of an instance a long time ago. A co-worker and his BIL (yes, his BIL) had a big porn hobby of renting pornos and copying them. They sort of thought they were geniuses or something. I found it rather odd.
No, he’s not.
I’ve been thinking about doing that. If I ever lose the music somehow, I can just go down to the library and check them out and burn them again! 
Or does that make me a thief? :dubious:
…Wow. Existensial.