It is not my intent to question the mods, but;
In this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=77198
Chronos says that the courts consider it to be illegal to rip MP3s from CD even if it for your own personal use. However I can’t find anything to substantiate this. Even in the Recording Industry Association of America’s website http://www.riaa.com/Music-Rules-2.cfm where the closest they get to addressing this is:
“A copyright is infringed when a song is made available to the public by uploading it to an Internet site for other people to download, sending it through an e-mail or chat service, or otherwise reproducing or distributing copies without authorization from the copyright owner. In civil cases copyright infringement can occur whether or not money was exchanged for the music, and in criminal cases there only needs to be a possibility of financial loss to the copyright holder or financial gain to the infringer. The NET Act defines “financial gain” as the receipt or expectation of receipt of anything of value, including receipt of other copyrighted works (as in MP3 trading).”
But this doesn’t seem to expressly deny the right to rip for your own personal use. Is it legal to make a tape recording from an album? Isn’t that pretty much the same thing as making an MP3 from a CD?
This brings up another point. If all of this trading in MP3s is illegal, why aren’t used CD stores?
