[Rebelbase]

Here's one for you: Back in the day of Napster, I downloaded some oldies of which I had previously purchased as vinyl recordings.

Crimminal or not?

[discostu]

Normally I react derissively to the hypothetical game but I actually like this question. The answer is: it depends and sort of.

If no longer own the LPs or any other legal version of the music then yes it's criminal.

If you do still own it then we're in an interesting gray area. Technically that's a bootleg copy, a copy made available by someone in violation of copyright. BUT by the current accepted standards of fair use it's perfectly legal for you to have a backup copy of the material, there's an assumption that you'd be making it not illegally downloading, but once you have it the why's and how's become rather immaterial. It's still basically illegal because going to the swapmeet and buying a Mexican bootleg of the album would also still be illegal, but it simply wouldn't be worth the hassle of proving it's an illegitimate copy of something you could have legitimately copied.

Of course if they were real oldies they might have been in the public domain which would mean it was 100% legal regardless of all other circumstances.