Copying CD's legal?

[AlexJ]

Interesting article on The Register today. Apparently under EU law a small charge is made on the price of a blank CD to (partially?) cover the artists/record labels for losses that occur when people copy music CD's.

Am I right in thinking therefore that I've effectively just bought a licence to copy these CD's, seeing as I've paid the levy to compensate them (and I'm doing so even when I'm not copying copyright CD's e.g. backing up my photographs).

Anyone fancy paying my legal costs so I can go test this out in court

[Harrison]

Very interesting. I think they would argue that they are doing it to compensate for those who are using the blank media to copy the CDs and if you are not then you are just unfortunately having to pay the extra due to those who do illegally use the discs to copy material.

The same argument has always existed in the gaming world too, with publishers claiming they have to charge so much for their games to make a profit because of the number of people pirating their games.

Personally none of this holds water in my view. For the majority of games and audio CDs people copy, would they have bothered buying the original if they couldn't copy it? Very doubtful in most cases. It always makes me laugh when they claim how much the industry has lost over the year due to piracy.

[Tiago]

They allways need piracy to get certain game to be famous... they need some thousands of people playing it to became a popular... and from those thousands there are many people who buy it just to have the original with maps/manuals....

It happend before and will happend again.... doom, quake, simms, GP, civilazation, etc... all of them were highly piracy, they need it. If some game it's impossible to pirate, if you dont have a way to copy it, it will be much more difficult to be famous.

Same with microsoft windows...

[Harrison]

Not quite the same with Doom as it was Shareware first so no one actually needed to pirate it, instead just needing to buy the full game to access the later maps, but I do get your point. This was very true on the Amiga too, which was the period in time when pirating games really started to take off.

But I don't think pirate copies of Windows is quite the same. Windows became popular because it was bundled and preinstalled on mearly every PC sold so it became the standard PC OS over night. Same was true of DOS before it.

[Teho]

Here in Norway it is legal to make a copy of any media for personal use. Making copies to close friends and family is also legal, the reasoning being that you just can't stop that anyway. By 'close' they mean people you are in touch with regularily in your own time, co-workers are for example not included.

[AlexJ]

I think they would argue that they are doing it to compensate for those who are using the blank media to copy the CDs and if you are not then you are just unfortunately having to pay the extra due to those who do illegally use the discs to copy material.

I'd imagine that would be their argument, but it's the guilty without trial bit that I don't like - why should it stop at blank CD's. Kitchen knifes make a great weapon, should everyone who buys a set get a 6 month jail sentence just to cover those who do go on to use it to maim others? Extreme example, but the same underlying principle.

[Harrison]

But, using that example, if the knife manufacturers were taken to court because their products were used (it is the sort of thing that would happen in the US), then the price of knifes would go up to cover the expenses of the court case!

[J T]

It's little wonder that so many people hate the recording industry (and an increasing number at that)

[Sharingan]

Piracy nowadays is way too impersonal, I think. Surf to torrentz.org -> Download Game Torrent -> Play.

At least in the Amiga days, you had to drop by a mate's place with a stack of floppy disks to get the stuff you wanted. And of course, there was the socializing and drinks while everyone was waiting for X-Copy to do its magic!

[Stephen Coates]

You still might have to wait sometimes, though, like when the illegal material is sent on disks through the post.

I think it is silly that the music and software industry is moaning about pirating stuff. It is always going to happen no matter how much copy protection they use. People will always crack the copy protection on software and music will always remain a sound wave which can be recorded by a tape/cd recorder, or a computer, regardless of what kind of copy protection the original file (or disc) used.

Considering the extremely low price of blank CDs, I don't think paying the extra fraction of a penny will make that much difference, but it is still unfair to those who arn't using it for piracy.