Obviously, laws differ in different countries, but in the US, making a backup copy for personal use is considered fair use, and is legal.

With DVDs and Blu-Rays, the situation is less clear because there is a specific law against breaking DRM. However, to my knowledge, there has never been a lawsuit against a _user_ of software that lets you rip a DVD or BD, that law has only been used against companies that make or distribute the software itself. Either because of the fair-use right or plausible deniability, it's unclear whether enforcement of this provision against an individual end-user would be permissible.

Even if it wouldn't fall under fair use because it broke DRM, I don't think the big labels want to risk a case against someone ripping for personal use only. There is too much risk that the story of the big giant trampling on the honest little guy making a backup will go viral (or anything else that would be fair use except for DRM laws). They know there are a lot of us who don't like DRM, but we don't quite have the power to change things, a few viral stories and the laws will change. (the treaties that require DRM can be renegotiated fast if there is political reason to do so)

> Obviously, laws differ in different countries, but in the US, making a backup copy for personal use is considered fair use, and is legal.

Title 17 certainly does not say that. The closest it comes to talking about the subject is by saying that copies are only allowed if consented to by the copyright owner. Space shifting and other forms of personal copies are at best a gray area with little case law to work off of.

Ripping CDs for your own personal use is not illegal, as CDs have no copy protection mechanism that you would be circumventing.

Unfortunately here in the UK that isn't true. It's technically illegal. See my other comment in the thread about it.

Ah, I didn’t know, that’s really mental.

In the United States there are a number of exceptions to the ban on circumventing DRM:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria...

CDs do have a copy protection mechanism in the form of flags in the subcode metadata that permit 0, 1, or unlimited copies to be made. It is used by standalone audio CD recorders to implement SCMS and prevent multi-generational copies. Everything else ignores it.

Oh, I didn't realize CDs didn't have copy protection? Why would they not? From the RIAA's perspective, isn't that just a way to double charge customers like the MPAA does?

There were attempts, but audio CDs were specced in 1980, and nobody was ever able to sell breaking compatibility with the existing (substantial) CD player ecosystem.

There's a summary of the context here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_and_DVD_copy_prot...

It seems counter-intuitive, but a red book audio CD really is more akin to a vinyl record than a CD-ROM. The laser locks onto a groove and throws bits directly at a few chips that perform error correction and convert the signal to analog with an absolutely minuscule amount of buffering. Obfuscation isn’t even on the table, let alone encryption.

CDs are older than DVDs, and when they were released there would have been no digital way to copy them. It makes sense that the DRM wouldn't have occurred to the developers of the format.

Also at the time they came out 640MB?! Who has that much money to keep on hard drive let alone the size of said drive. Remember when this was spec'd out 64k was considered a huge amount of memory. A box of floppies would cost 30-40+ dollars. That same box might hold 0.5 to 2 MP3s depending on format size and the song. That obviously dropped off over the years. But just ripping them was not even really feasible. Never mind a robust enough CPU to play something like a MP3. People would copy CD's over to tape. But that was considered acceptable as the gen loss was enough for the owners to not like it much but accept it.

I remember asking the HS computing teacher in the late 80s if CDs could be copied to a computer, since they were both digital. He said... hmm, it should be theoretically possible. Drives for PCs would not come out affordably until the early/mid 90s.

CDs are just digital storage media. You could just layer DRM on top of it, but you'd have to get the whole ecosystem to move. And I have to think they probably would if the RIAA insisted.

> On the one hand, you seem to (understandably) take great pride in the legal ownership of your CDs, but on the other hand, you're almost certainly breaking the law by ripping them. How do you feel about that?

It's totally legal both in the US and the EU (apparently not in the UK though).

Now I do very probably, without knowing it, break some law(s) every single freaking day because "the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws". And I feel exactly zero guilt about that.

If you're ripping CDs that you purchased and only for your own personal use (i.e. not distributing the ripped files), then IMO the far more relevant question is an ethical one: does what you're doing in any way harm the artists or the copyright holders of the works you are copying?

No, no one is harmed when one uses content for which one has an appropriate license. Of course, some people might make less money, but that doesn't constitute "harm" in any meaningful way (they also make less money than if I donated my entire disposable income, but no one would argue that this is "harm" [although I don't want to give the RIAA any ideas...]) and indeed they should be pricing that into the sales of any given media (it's already insane that we give copyrights for 70 years after the lifetime of the artist).

On the other hand, the DMCA harms me by limiting my right to use content for which I legally hold the appropriate license.