There is evidence to the contrary:
And those are superceded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
There’s nothing illegal about copying your CDs. No one is arguing that it is. You do not own a license to those music files, though. You only have a license granted to back up your physical media, and that license is only in effect as long as that media is in your possession. As soon as you dispose of your media (CDs, DVD, or whatever), the license to possess digital backups expires, and you must delete the files.
Let’s say my house is hit by a tornado, flood. or fire. The original CD is carried off or destroyed. I then must destroy my backups?
Let’s say I just can’t find the original. Maybe it fell behind some furniture. Maybe a light-fingered guest took it. Maybe I put it in the basement. Maybe it was in a stack of newspapers I took to the recycling bin. I just don’t know where it could be. After a reasonable search I can’t find it. Do I then have to start deleting my backups?
And does the same apply to MP3 downloads? If the original hard drive where I downloaded it crashes, but I buy a new disk to replace it, and restore it from the backups that I kept. Do I have to delete the MP3 files from the restored disk image?
Man, this train just took a dirt road.
mmm
Just repeating what I’ve read online from different sources. Personally, I don’t care what you do with them. As I said, there’s no “digital police” who are going to come after your files. I’m not really interested in going around and around on this. I’m just putting in my 2¢ worth. Take it any way you will.
Did any of these sources point out the section of the DMCA that says you must have an original copy in your possession in order to have a backup copy?
If you have a Best Buy near you call and see if they’ll take them and good for your wanting to keep your CDs out of the landfill .
Go look for yourself. Like I said, I don’t care what you do with them. That’s up to you, and I’m not interested in debating.
This is, I think, kind of spot on. Backups exist (mostly) to protect against loss. I’m an IT dork - backups are a part of my daily life. They’re important. I’ve seen buildings destroyed, and backups saved the data (critical to the function of the organizations contained therein); I’ve hosed hard drives (last night, actually), and backups saved the day. I don’t have the original media for everything, and don’t want it. Also, think about the OS you’re running right now - most likely it’s Windows or a Mac flavor. Did you’re PC/Mac come with physical media other than the HDD? Probably not, these days. There’s probably a recovery partition, but what if the drive failed completely? Are you no longer entitled to have an OS?
These are questions that the law isn’t really well-equipped to deal with.
In theory, you’re supposed to use the backups, and put the originals in safe place. Or so they said back when we were making copies of floppies.
But, even if it is legal to keep to copy after the original is lost, that would be different than selling or giving it away. If that wasn’t the case, then you could just copy and sell the CD to someone else, who would then copy and sell the CD, and so on. Clearly that reduces sales of the original.
It’s not something I particularly care about, given all the other ways you can get that music for free anyways. But I do think there is a difference.
Yes, when you purchase a CD the license to have the music is the CD itself.
There is also another practical consideration for keeping the audio CDs. The audio CDs have a better sound quality than whatever audio compressed format you are using now, such as MP3 files. So in the future when there is a new audio format, you will want to re-transfer them to your digital library from the actual CDs again, not from a digital audio file format that has lessen the audio qualify such as MP3.
If you don’t have any use for the music on the audio CDs themselves, I would give them away, because someone else will enjoy them. There are places which accept them as donations and you could take a tax deduction for the value of the donation.
I have digital data CD-ROMs which have old backups on them, and after they have been archived as part of the file server, I have no use for the CD-ROMs any longer. So the only thing which is “trash” is the CD-ROM itself. The jewel box is plastic and that can be recycled along with other plastic items.
[Emphasis added]. Do you have a citation for the bolded portion?
Not if you ripped the CDs to a lossless format such as FLAC or ALAC. Playback from a lossless compression is bit-perfect relative to the original. I have all my CDs ripped to FLAC, and translate the FLAC to MP3 for use on memory-limited devices.
Such a license would also need to be legally enforceable, because I could try to sell you a CD with any kind of bizarre license.
One thing which has not been pointed out here is that it used to be the case that people paid fees/royalties up front when they bought blank tapes/discs/drives/media. In other words, private copying was explicitly foreseen and accounted for. Practically speaking, what is/is not permitted varies from country to country and is volatile all the time even within a given country, consumers don’t really know or simply don’t care, and there is no, nor could there practically be, any enforcement anyway. (Also how would it work if you flew with your MP3 player from one country to another?)
ETA: what “they” (musicians’ unions) actually do care somewhat about are commercial counterfeiting/piracy operations, industrial-scale file sharing, plagiarism, that sort of thing.
The dirt road is way back in the rear view mirror now.
There was also an entire column on sampling…
The shiny side of a CD makes an adequate reflector. Please send them to Thailand, where there are hundreds of thousands of wagons without any lights or reflectors being pulled by slow-moving tractors.
In daytime, or even early dusk, these slow-moving rural wagons are quaint, reminding us that Thailand is still a developing country. After night-fall — which comes suddenly in the tropics — the wagons become invisible. My night vision has always been poor; when forced to drive at night I keep my high-beams on. On one occasion I nobly committed suicide rather than crash into an invisible wagon that suddenly materialized right in front of me, filled with people. (I then hit trees in a very precise sequence and orientation that minimized damage and made me a believer in Quantum Immortality.)
The terms of a license for music sold on digital media is dictated by the DCMA, and cannot be modified by the copyright holder/seller (except to the extent that the seller can waive his own rights).
That’s more than the average consumer is going to do.