A friend at my office purchased several albums of digital music in WMA format, and upon trying to make CDs for herself, discovered that she had “insufficient rights” to burn these to CD (even in plain-old-audio format!). She was under the impression that she had the rights to burn them to CD three times, and is very put out about the whole thing. She asked if I could help, and I said I thought I knew who could - that’s you guys! My reputation as the office computer geek is on the line here, but I confess that I am not up to the task when it comes to some of these new file formats – my solution is “don’t buy proprietary formats,” which is not a valid solution for her.
I thought I remembered someone saying that you could take the audio stream from a WMA as you play it, and record it digitally to the HDD so that you owned it as an MP3 or WAV. So, two questions:
Would doing this fall under “fair use” (is this legal, kosher, halal, etc.)?
Any Dopers who have done this – assuming it’s on the up and up – what software packages did you use, and how well did they work?
I don’t mind swimming in blurry legal waters, but I don’t want to do something that is clearly unlawful. Help me out, Dopers!
Welcome to digital rights management (DRM). Legally, you probably can not do as you wish. Just as if you buy a DVD, you can not make a backup of it legally (for most DVDs). You also can not play it in other regious, etc.
So, of course it can be done (easily, in fact, on other OSes), but I doubt it would be legal. I personally would convert the files to a lossless format, then burn a CD. There are tools out there to do this if you look for them.
As an aside, this is why I do not support formats that support this type of behaviour. It is rediculous that if I buy a DVD in Europe, I can’t watch it in the US (legally) if it is region encoded, even though I own the DVD. They will start doing similar things with CDs, using encrupted data streams and such so that you can not (easily) rip them to other formats (mp3, ogg, etc).
Things will get much worse, and the worst part is that the public is largely unaware of the creeping DRM into all types of media.
How is she receiving these errors, is it a system error, or a file error? I’m working on the angle here that there is a possibility that the system admin has disabled CDROM privledges on the computer. Either through the local security policy, or disabled security rights to a CD-Writer .DLL file. Has the computer been re-imaged recently? Does burning CD’s work other then burning the WMA’s? Just trying to make sure that the computer itself isn’t preventing you, instead of the file rights.
While copying and distributing copies is indeed illegal I do not believe there is anything illegal with owning a region-free DVD player or with ripping DVD VOBs to your disk or with converting from WMA format to other formats. There are plenty of websites out there which discuss these things and provide tools and nobody has said they are doing anything illegal. www.doom9.org is a site where all sorts of technical issues are discussed and shich is very strict in respecting copyrights and not allowing discussions about circumventing them. www.dvdrhelp.com is another site which will not allow copyright infringement and yet list ASFtools as a program which allows conversion from WMA format (I believe because I am not familiar with it).
I was under the impression that, compared to MP3 files, WMA files give you the same audio quality in a smaller file (or better quality in the same size file). Is this not correct? And if so, wouldn’t it be a reason to like it?
In regard to the OP, one obvious question to ask your friend is, did these albums she bought come with any kind of documentation about what she was/wasn’t authorized to do with the music?