Copyright violations, piracy, and helping out someone

In the Uk it is no longer legal to rip your own cd’s for your own use (it was legal for a time). So all of us Roon users here in the UK are already breaking the law as it stands today.

Yet another reason why I’m happy to have moved to the Netherlands… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping#Netherlands

Indeed, but we do pay for it:

wikipeda/google translate:
The home copy levy or private copying fee is a legally established levy on data carriers (such as CDs / DVDs, hard disks and electronics such as mobile phones) that benefits copyright owners to compensate for home copies.

That’s certainly a crime!

The crime was not piracy. The crime was that he was profiting from copyrighted works without proper licensing. See https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/763286/download for the case document.

He was selling premium access to RockDizMusic for $90/year and he was hosting advertising. See page 3 of the document above for details.

This profiteering on the back of copyrighted works is the crime, not the actual piracy. The license holders (the RIAA and those they represent) would love for you to all believe that this is criminal, but until you cross that line, it just isn’t.

In Australia s.109A of the Copyright Act still provides that copying for private and domestic use is not an infringement of copyright subject to the conditions set out.

An infringement of copyright in Australia is usually a civil wrong entitling the owner to remedies, not a criminal offence. Division 5 of Part V of the Act, however, sets out various offences including commercial scale infringement prejudicing an owner and commercial dealings with infringing copies.

Yes. But the consequences sharing music for no profit can be severe:

I remember this case very well, and the RIAA was heavily lobbying for this.

He ended up paying nothing, and the judge asked congress to change the laws to prevent this type of nonsense. Additionally, since this date, the random drive-by lawsuits against torrent IPs have dropped to nil because of law changes.

Anyway, I’m not promoting piracy, I am just clarifying that copyright violation for private use is a civil issue, and not a crime.

Those of you who feel otherwise, do you think the original poster should be locked up or fined to the point of bankruptcy?

@Ericj - thanks for posting this.
I believed you were allowed to make a backup copy and must have missed this particular ruling.

So basically everyone on here in the UK is the wrong side of the law on the assumption they have ripped a CD at some point in time.

… except me who has just deleted all my backups with a few megavolts :smile:

No. They have gone from a law that specifically says you can to the previous situation which remains untested in law. That places the financial hurdles back in the way of any sort of defence on the basis of principle and so is unlikely to be challenged.

In general a very good topic you extracted from the other topic. Congratulations! Good to see that Roon is very much aware of what legislation is and what is propganda from the content manager firms, labels, ‚owners‘ etc. In the desperate search of new business models they started to criminalize the consumers, even if they paid on storage for private copy use and private sharing. Private sharing is and has ben proven to be a great model to distribute awareness and one of the most important human behaviors: participation, inclusiveness and openess. No clue how money counters want to live democracy. Whenever I can privately share experience, knowledge and things I have at disposal I can enrich myself without the burdon of quantifying the economics behind it. This is part of freedom! Good that in most countries this is still legally possible.

“Private Sharing” is not “legal” in most countries. It might be in China but certainly not in Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, etc.

You‘ve never shared your car, your hammer or other tools with your friends, neighbours or family? Illegal in most European countries? Were do you live?

You are being pedantic. You know exactly what I am talking about here. “Sharing” and “loaning” are two very different things. It’s one thing to loan a friend a CD. It’s quite another to share the contents of that CD with a friend or friends for them to play while you still have the CD.

Sharing of music and movies (also making copies for) for close friends and family is legal in Norway.
Last time I checked Norway was part of Western Europe.

Yes. If you copy your CD’s to a drive then sell or give those discs to someone else the individual should/could be punished.

But you are wrong with your claim that private sharing is illegal in most countries. Maybe it is the case in UK, but not in most other EU countries, in Switzerland, in the US and … There are limits of course, these can be down to households or to family only. What is not allowed is public distribution without license from the right holder.

Danny, the NET Act does consider make distributing copy protected software (music) even without commercial advantage a crime. Am I misunderstanding your response?

Welcome to the world of immaterial content. The days of CD loaning are soon over. In today‘s data world there is no carrier left. So laws are changed to this new situation. Loaning gets replaced with sharing. The industry tries to make formats with expiration dates, but this also has its price. There are pro and cons especially on dependencies, loss of archiving function for history etc.

Thany you, Danny!