RIAA: Ripping CDs to your hard disk is illegal

10:47 AM on 12.31.2007   |   Dale North

103 comments

These days, there's little love left for the Recording Industry Association of America. It's understandable that they'd want to clean up music piracy, but they always seem to approach things in the worst way. Now they say that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music onto hard disk. What?

A Washington Post article says that the music industry is going after collections of music on computers, now calling MP3s made from legally bought CDs "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings. This comes from legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Arizona man who kept a collection of about 2,000 on his computer.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

In a different case, Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, said. that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,' " she adds.

If the RIAA is really standing behind this, that would mean that the ripped audio on my PS3 and Xbox 360 is illegal, not to mention the music on my PSP and most of the files on my iPod.

Is the RIAA really going to enforce this, or are they just getting desperate.