Legal, since the tape’s price includes royaties. Note that you do not have the right to make the copy, but since you’re using “approved media” (i.e., tape), you cannot be sued for the copy.
Not legal, since no royalties are paid on the CD sale. CDs aren’t approved media.
Not an issue; there’s no law against playing a song, just copying it.
Illegal.
Legal. Tapes are approved media. Plus courts have ruled that you have the right (no such ruling exists for CDs).
Illegal. You don’t have the right to make copies of the movie; only to watch it.
Not relevant. It’s the copying that’s the issue, not who sees the copy.
Illegal.
Note that copyright law is civil law, so someone has to take you to court over this. However, I’m using “illegal” as shorthand for “you’re gonna lost and have to pay a fine and the other side’s court costs.”
… have copyright laws ever stopped anyone from backing up an audio CD for personal use?
Also, I think you misread
I would imagine that copying music to a digital medium is legal, considering that there is an entire sub-industry built on by huge companies (namely, Microsoft) in copying media digitally and playing it on portable devices.
DISCLAIMER: I’m not an attorney, but am a reasonably up-to-date audiophile. In other words, don’t bet the farm on this advice, but a week’s wages might be worth wagering.
Legal
Not Legal
Legal
Legal
Not Legal
Legal
Not Legal
Legal
Legal
Not Legal
All that means is that you live in a nicer climate than I do. The relevant laws are Federal.
It all comes down to what the courts deem “fair use”. In practice, this means pretty much anything you want to do with a copyrighted performance, OTHER than distributing copies of it to others, is “fair use”, assuming you received it legally in the first place. Whether by purchasing it in a store, or grabbing it off the airwaves.
Downloading MP3’s off the Internet, a la Napster, is illegal because the person you’re getting it from doesn’t have the right to distribute it. (Obviously, this doesn’t apply to cases where the owner of the copyright is the one providing the download.)
Playing a copy for a friend is legal because you’re not conveying ownership. The same is true if you lend your original CD/DVD/etc. to a friend, unless you have reason to believe your friend intends to copy it. In which case, you’re verging on (and maybe already are, but that’s a judgement call) conspiring to commit piracy.
Of course, there are constant battles over this, so by the time this hits the website, something may have changed.
I am going to shoot down recording a song off the radio as being legal. A radio station is Seattle has twice in the past 10 years drew the rath of the FCC for making their playlist “recordable”. They were even promoting a “CD Sideshow” and “RockBlocks”, a half hour of uninterupted music. A few months later both promo ideas went away and every song they played the DJ’s would talk well into the beginning of the song or sound effects, such as barking dogs or a rooster crowing would pop up out of nowhere. The reasons were finally brought out in a story in the newspaper, the FCC had cracked down on the radio station for blatant violation of federal copyright laws. This is based on the fact that radio stations do not pay for the music they play, and the royalties collected to subvert cppyright claims are not paid on the music. Even today on that station, you will never hear two songs played back to back without some kind of interuption to lessen the quality of a recording.
I’d like to add that music CD-Rs (the ones that cost about 40 cents more per disc) are approved media, as long as you use an approved device like a stereo component CD burner to record to them. You can’t be prosecuted for noncommercial copying to music CD-R.
A lot of these scenarios have never been tested in court, and aren’t addressed specifically by the rather old laws. So any characterizations as legal or illegal are debatable.
There is one catch to having it be legal to play a sound or movie to someone else, and that is, you can’t charge money for it, i.e. you convert your personal copy of Matrix to an AVI movie, and then charge people $2.00 to come over to your house and watch the AVI on your HDTV.
The relevant laws are Federal.