One more thing, the studios consider you a pirate for converting your albums to MP3.
Not only that but if you make a backup copy of your cd, they call you a pirate.
I don’t really care what the studios think. Case law is good for me; I’m not putting my mp3 files in an accessable location, so I don’t fall into the trap that some have fallen into, of being called distributers.
This exercise has also given me a chance to fix a longstanding ethical dilemna for me. When I was in college, I made tapes of all my records, so I wouldn’t scratch the records. I also made tapes of my brother’s records, and my roommate’s records, so I could listen to those without risk.
But I don’t have all those records anymore. Some I lost, some were my brother’s and they are in his garage in boxes, and some were my roommate’s. The ones I don’t own, I’ve had “illegal copies” of since I graduated college.
For years, there was nothing I could really do about this. The records are obscure, and even now with e-bay and other internet sites giving global reach, it is hard to find the albums (when I do, they are dirt-cheap, so I could go that route), but back then there was no chance to get copies to make my tape collection “legal”. And I wasn’t going to get rid of my tapes, because I liked the music. I just had no way of becoming “legal”. It’s too bad the record companies didn’t have a way to let people pay for their tape copies.
Anyway, in the past few years, MP3’s have popped up for all sorts of old music. I can download most of it from Amazon cheap. So I’ve been re-buying my stuff. I’ve been able to correct 90% of the problem, I estimate — 10% of my tapes that I don’t have records for, the records simply don’t exist, and nobody has ever cut them to CD or MP3.
But as best I can, I’ve brought myself into what I call ethical legality. I’ve done everything in my power to correct the problem, and to purchase all the music I listen to.
And I’ve had a blast listening to my old tapes, and the old songs. And I’ve bought a lot of new stuff on Amazon in the process (I love their $5 MP3 album sales).
I understand why I was non-compliant. I really couldn’t correct the violations, in any rational way I could find. I can’t imagine there is a record sold today that you can’t download the songs for 99 cents from somewhere.
And in my opinion, if you won’t pay a buck for the song, you don’t really like it that much, and you shouldn’t steal it. We used to pay 25 cents just to LISTEN ONCE to a song.