The return of cassettes

[ghettosynth]

Good old analog times. Nobody blamed you to make a copy .

The world is strange . Now we can make (nearly) perfect copys in a wink and spread it in the world, we have laws against something that was always a dream to do.

Spoken like a man who's never worked for something and then had the pay stolen from him.

the germans used to have a system whereby some of the money from each sale of a blank tape got sent to the recording comapnys, thus making home taping and sharing legal
hes german btw.

Was/is it actually legal, though? In Spain, every time you buy equipment that's capable of storing data, part of your money end up in the coffers of intellectual property owners (ideally artists, in reality self-serving representatives of songwriters guilds or big corporations), yet you are still not allowed to use the equipment to store unauthorised copies. Catch 22. So you can spend lots of money on a PC, store nothing on it except legally acquired software and copies of music, video, photos etc you've made yourself, and the state hands over your money to Julio Iglesias for the theoretical damage your activities have done to his financial situation.

Yep, I'm fairly certain that in Canada, at least, it was/is, in fact, legal. To be clear, it was legal to make private non-sharable copies. That means that one could buy the vinyl record, tape it, and use the tape in my car without "breaking the law."

In conjunction with the levy, the Copyright Act allows individuals to make copies of sound recordings for their own private, non-commercial use. They may not distribute the copy.

But hold the phone, canada isn't some socialist standout, it's legal almost everywhere except the U.K. It's, in fact, legal in the U.S. I don't know why people think that it isn't. What's illegal, is sharing your tapes.

From House Report No. 102-780(I), August 4, 1992: "In short, the reported legislation [Section 1008] would clearly establish that consumers cannot be sued for making analog or digital audio copies for private noncommercial use".

Notice that private and noncommercial are taken together, you can't tape for any kind of public noncommercial use, which is where most file sharers run afoul of the law.

[trimph1]

mmmm...wonder whatever happened to 'fair use'...


btw...did not notice that piracy became the topic of this thread....

[kritikon]

Not sure it's illegal in the UK either. From memory, they eventually decided much the same thing, that as long as you bought a hard copy original, you could tape for your own use, not for distribution. Which as far as I know is still the case digitally. The big difference with digital piracy is that so many don't actually buy the original copy. With cassette you had to have a hard copy to tape from. I'm not sure, but I vaguely remember that in the UK it was illegal to tape someone else's hard copy. But as with most things, laws are only as good as they are enforcable. Can't remember how it went with radio - I always thought it was allowable to tape radio music as long as it's for private use, but I could be completely wrong?