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."skipscada wrote: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.vurt wrote: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 legalzerocrossing wrote:Spoken like a man who's never worked for something and then had the pay stolen from him.tomtoo wrote: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.
hes german btw.
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.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.
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.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".