I've ripped hundreds of CDs onto my computer but I'm not a criminal or a pirate. These are all CDs that I paid (or overpaid) for. I often prefer to listen to the music I've bought on my computer. My PC has decent stereo speakers, and I spend a lot of time working there. But it's more than that. With the songs on my hard drive, I have instant access to my entire collection -- much better than rooting through piles of discs. I also like to transfer the files to my portable MP3 player so I can listen at work without schlepping CDs back and forth. And I take songs from several albums and burn them onto custom-mix CDs ("Still More 80s") for the car.
Copy-proof CDs won't let me do any of that. Certainly record companies are entitled to take measures to stymie widespread copying, in which hundreds or thousands of illegal duplicates are made from a single CD. But somehow the legacy of Napster has given all copying a bad name.
Did you know that under U.S. copyright law, it's generally considered permissible to make copies of music you've purchased? "It's completely legal," explains Jessica Litman, a law professor at Wayne State University and the author of "Digital Copyright." As long as you're making a copy for private, noncommercial use, you're pretty much in the clear. File-sharing services have gotten into trouble by enabling copying on such a massive scale that it's not really noncommercial even if no money changes hands.
Yeh, those two dozen Napster users gave all the legal copiers a bad name. Right. Millions upon millions were using Napster. If it were not for the brats of the world wanting free sruff, then copying would not have a bad name. I'm sorry, I just do not buy this "I just want to copy these so I can listen to them 0n my computer" arguments.