So...according to a legal representative of Song BMG (the music arm of Sony), buying a CD and then ripping the songs to put them on an MP3 player is illegal.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... aling.html

Then do not sell music files or cds. That will guarantee that no illegal copies exist. Simple as that.

Yeah, I knew that. Maybe that's less common over knowledge in the US, or not even true in parts.

But making any copy of any copyrighted matiereal is illegal over here. You're not allowed to record TV programs or songs from the radio.

Wait a moment though! Sky can release a digital sky box that has a hard drive built in, purposefully to copy the programs! yay!

If you ask me, it's just one of those laws that really should be erradicated from the big bumper book of law, but if things like the below are still in, I don't think anyone's gonna bother changing it now!

Alabama: Putting salt on a rail road track may be punishable by death.
You may not have an ice cream cone in your back pocket at any time.

Israel: Changing into or out of a bathing suit in a public restroom is prohibited.

And technically, in the UK, it's still Illegal to get divorced, carrots are the only goods you can legally trade on a sunday and it's also illegal to be drunk in a licensed premasis.

hah...good stuff.

Actually, in the US we have a provision in copyright law that protects our right to copy copyright works under certain circumstances. It's generally accepted that fair use extends to making backup copies of media and not having to purchase multiple copies. For anyone that cares the law is here:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html

And, like any law, it's long and boring. But it does lay down numerous exemptions to copyright law, including fair use. nothing specifically allowing copying of media, of course, but it's meant as a guideline, not to manually define all possible versions of fair use.

What's funny is that Sony has created media players that "illegally" copy music cds. Like their mini disk players.

Ehm... khm. As if people couldn't rip it all out anyway. You can play it on your speakers, you can intercept the signal and write it in a non-restricted file. You can play it with your house theater, the same shit.

yea, it's known as the analog hole. The big entertainment industries want to get rid of that weakness too, not that it'll ever happen. I don't think there's technical fix for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

Well, not quite. What I actually meant is intercepting the digital signal right before it be converted to the analog one (capturing analog signal is currently an idle work, so I didn't think I should mention it). It may require a little of hardware work, if D/A convertor is built in the decoder (if there is any) but it's quite doable. You intercept the signal, you provide feed to a device, maybe you'll have to write a small driver (probably not necessarily), and voila: you get raw, digital signal, right on your HDD.

Where's the bunny: if you capture the analog signal, it may be lossy. If you capture digital one right on the well, you ripped off their ass.