Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems CD Copying to Hard Drive deemed "Illegal"

The US has a "Fair Use" clause in their copyright law I believe, whilst we don't, so technically in the UK it is against copyright law.

Good timing as they're consulting on changing the UK side of things:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7176538.stm

Like it is (or has been, haven't kept up with current copyright and fair use law there) in Sweden, in Norway format shifting/copying CDs (or DVDs) is legal, for personal use and even for making copies to family and close friends.
What is illegal is making/making public/making available ways to 'crack' new copy protection schemes, but if they are already considered 'in general use/generally available' (very open to interpretation, I know) using and distributing such 'cracks' or programs is considered legal.

Actually, I think that the CD was developed initially as a music carrier and then adopted as a generic data carrier. The red book preceded the white and yellow books.

Sanity to prevail in the UK?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7176538.stm

I thought at the time CD was developed it was developed so it could play back in computers and there was no worry that the data on the CD was not protected in any way.

best regards,
Jerry

Without wanting to be too nostalgic, when CD was being developed, the PC (and Mac) was in its infancy

Remember that PC's of that time typically had 5.25" 1.2Mb Floppy Drives and if you were extravagant, a 20Mb Hard Drive!!!!

It took a LONG time before CD Drives made their way into PC's and 3.5" floppy drives were still standard issue on Desktops until around 2000.

At that time, I don't think many were thinking about using the 2 of them in conjunction with each other. If they had, then I think the shutters (i.e copy protection) would have come down MUCH earlier

There was, but if you look at all the copy protected CD's out there you'll see they don't (shouldn't?!) bear the official "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo because they don't meet the specifications.

In my country (Norway), the right to copy for personal use and giving the copy to friends and relatives is part of the copyright law. As a non-EU member we remain among the very few countries left in Europe who has not fully implemented the dreaded INFOSOC (Information Society Directive) directive, which is a bluecopy of the US DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) law.

The RIAA interpretation of DMCA is dubious, though - and very much their own. The American Fair Use principle probably overrules any attempt to outlaw personal copying.

In the EU territory, however, this is less clear. As member states already have given up parts of their sovereignity, they might have to comply. That goes for our good neighbours the Swedes as well, Tommypeters.

Anautorized mass distribution through the Internet is clearly illegal, but the law is as good as impossible to enforce as long as people use torrents (often with spoofed IPs) and not P2P.

There is a huge gap between reality and law when it comes to digital content. And there appear to be no clear solution for copyright holders who want to maintain their existing business model.

I believe the engineers are usually about 10 years ahead of where the consumer market place is. I think they absolutely knew about open formats and the potential for piracy. Way back in the 70s the software available for the Apple II was copy protected. I find the RIAAs stance here to be both impractical and dishonest, and therefore counterproductive. Thats all.

best regards,
Jerry

When has an impractical stance stopped the RIAA in the past?

As a historical note, when the CD was released the common disk sizes were measured in 10s of MBs so storing CD on hard drive was impossible. Over the years our drive sizes have grown such that uncompressed data can be stored > 1000x over on our hard drives.

When the DVD was released ~10 years ago a 10GB disk wasn't even available so the capacity of the media was (barely) larger than a state of the art disk. 10 years later, it's 1TB. So we've increased by a factor of 100 in the time the medium was released. Size vs. CD ~15:1

When HD-DVD and Blu-ray were released ~9 years after DVD, hard drive size outstripped their capacity by > 10:1 while the generational increase for formats was between 3 and 5 to 1.

It's amazing how quickly we've advanced our mass storage.

Cheers,

No doubt there John. I remember I had a hard drive for my Apple II back in like 1985 or so. The drive was probably 16" long x 4" wide x 8" high and it sounded like a blow drier! I think it had either 1MB or 10MB of capacity. It was called something like the "Cider". Anyway, I just wish the powers that be would use their energy more productively. As it stands their actions read like the last gasps of a dying business model.

best regards,
Jerry

Yeah, I remember putting a Seagate 20MB full height hard drive in my IBM PC. 20MB may not sound like a lot, but then it was the equivalent of 60 360KB 5.25 floppy discs. Oh, it cost nearly $500 in 1985.