My parents got me a CD/MP3/WMA receiver for my car for Christmas. I haven’t actually managed to get it installed or anything yet, but I’m beginning to wonder how exactly one could legally create a CD of MP3s.
The first option is to purchase CDs and rip them. This is not very cost-effective if I only want one song on a CD, and CDs are beginning to include DRM software (you can see Matt's rant on this). Online music stores are handy and more cost effective, but they all include DRM as well.
Any DRM scheme can be defeated (some trivially), but the DMCA makes that illegal in most cases. So I guess I’ll wind up breaking the law one way or another. I wonder how the legal penalties compare between pirating music and breaking the DMCA to fairly use songs I own a license for.
They should really wink at you when you buy one of these things.
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Accepts BBCode with a few enhancements.
But I see the point about purchasing individual songs. If you don’t mind re-encoding the audio, breaking DRM on songs is stupidly easy, but the DMCA is a very broad act.
If there were ever a case of morality vs. legality, this is it.