Copyright Theft

[James Laver]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Aaron Trevena <aaron.trevena at gmail.com> wrote:
> Strictly speaking it's illegal for me to use torrents to download
> songs because I'm too lazy to go into the loft, get the LP, find a
> record player, play it, put it back, and even illegal to copy a CD I
> purchased (or even to workaround  DRM preventing me from even playing
> my Duran Duran CD on my computer).

And they day someone gets taken to court for copying a CD they bought
to a computer (so they could put it on their ipod/equivalent for
example), the law will be changed.

On the DRM front, it's a bit more tricky. If you boot a DRMed CD in
linux (typically the actual audio is on a seperate track and the file
table has been appropriately mangled to confuse the windows cdrom
driver), are you then at risk because you can play them (thus
bypassing the copy protection)?

There was a furore a couple of years ago when Virgin stuck the CD logo
on a coldplay disc and because of the drm and file table mangling, it
wasn't a valid CD. Additionally you only found out it was DRMed when
you opened the case and were greeted with a "Thanks for fighting
piracy and supporting artists by buying this copy protected CD"
message.

Quick googling turns up
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/01/coldplays-new-cd-has.html

--James