You were specifically quoting me on what I said about taping Forrest Gump- not audio taping- from two different sources. I asked you to make sense of your claim, “In one case, you’ve already paid royalties when you purchased the recording media; in the other–not.” Then you claimed that’s what Congress says. Where?
It appears I did indeed misread your question. I apologize. It all comes from doing too many things at once.
Let’s go back to the original question.
Actually, both are illegal, with one exception. The Court said time-shifting *might * be ok in Sony v. Universal. But the Sony Court didn’t face the issue head on, and as I pointed out before, the definition is very narrow. I’ll quote myself from an earlier discussion of the issue:
As for why the logic of *Sony * doesn’t apply to copying an already-recorded movie, RealityChuck nailed it earlier. The only basis for permitting taping in the first place was
That reasoning just doesn’t apply to copying a recording.
Again, sorry for the ass-hattery. Hope this helps.
No problem. Sorry for getting sarcastic to get back at ya.
Okay, so it seems VCR recording is a different story.
But back to audio. Are the following facts correct?:
When I buy a blank cassette, part of the money goes to the music industry.
Because of the above fact, I can tape music on the radio.
If those two facts are correct, it still seems odd to me that in the U.S. I can tape a song on the radio, but I can’t tape a copy of my friend’s CD, especially since the music industry is getting a chunk of the change. It seems Canada got it right by allowing people to make copies of their friend’s music.
I was going to respond to this, but things just got busy here at work, and I wouldn’t want to get it wrong. I’ll come back a bit later and see if I can give a helpful response.
The statute isn’t really clear on the point, actually. As you can see, it doesn’t distinguish between sources of recording as long as the recordings are on tape, of music, and for noncommercial purposes.
Although that doesn’t specifically say that blank cassette tapes don’t have royalties being paid on them, it wouldn’t make sense that regular CD-Rs don’t pay royalties to the music industry but cassettes do.
I apparently also missed (I knew this at one point) that although analog cassettes are clearly exempted under the provision quoted earlier, no royalties are paid on their sale.
Here is the royalty provision:
Let me summarize, then:
Non-commercial copying is permitted on analog tapes, and on digital equipment and media that qualify under the AHRA (including payment of required royalties).
It’s not *because * the royalties are paid that you are permitted to copy, but because the recording device and recording media qualify as such under the AHRA’s definitions (§ 1001) and comply with the other requirements of the Act, which include royalty payments for some devices and media and not others.
As for as the rationale behind the laws? I’m going with ‘worse’ because it makes even less sense now.
Neither cassette tapes nor regular CD-R purchases have a portion of the profits going to the music industry, yet for some unknown reason I can record the radio with tapes and not data CDs.
Also, I still see no rationale why I can have music I didn’t pay for when recorded from the radio and not a friend’s CD.
I’m not whining to you about this, Gfactor. I’m just whining in general.
This article has a pretty good summary of the basic ideas behind the AHRA: MEIEA - Journal
The recording industry was less worried about analog media because with each successive generation, the quality deteriorates. Not so with digital. That’s the basic distinction. They were going to have to deal with digital copy technology, and this was a sort of compromise–allow copying, get paid in advance, ensure some protections were in place. Later they got the right to prevent copying technologically, too.
Beyond that, all I can offer is that the statute says what it says. There are plenty of statutes out there that are at least as twisted.
