Turning Up the Heat

The recording industry, already making friends everywhere by suing their customers, has decided to take an even harder line. In filings in an Arizona case, lawyers for the RIAA are asserting that legitimately purchased CDs cannot legally be copied onto a computer. All those digital copies you've got sitting on your hard drive or transferred onto your iPod are illegal. In an explanation on its site, the RIAA admits that copying onto your hard drive or MP3 player "won't usually raise concerns" if you own the CD and don't share it with anybody else. Interestingly, you can also copy your CDs onto old-fashioned analog cassette tapes, as long as it's not commercial purposes. Digitally, you can copy your CD to mini-discs, digital tapes, or particular Audio CD-Rs. I have to admit that I'd always wondered what Audio CD-Rs were for, because at least as I understand the technology, there's no way they could be better suited to digitally reproducing music than other CD-Rs. I'd also wondered why they were more expensive. Now I know it's because the manufacturers have paid a record-industry tariff.

Although this is apparently the first time the RIAA have pursued this argument in court, they've been asserting it on the Webpage for quite some time. Steve Benen, guest blogging at The Washington Monthly, remembered a boingboing post from almost two years ago that identifies an awfully juicy target for prosecution.