Page 1 of Are CD backups legal?

Well is it legal to make yourself one copy of a CD if you purchased the original , me thinks not but read somewhere it was legal, anyone know?

I believe you are allowed to make 1 backup copy for your own personal use. After all you have paid for the CD and are reasonalby entitled to make sure you have a working copy.

The same goes for DVDs - if you own the thing, you can make one back up copy for personal use.

In fact in the early PC days (ahhh, the days of 640K and 16 colour screens) some software manufacturers used to advise that you made a backup of the floppy discs that you had just purchased.

I think it`s only legal in the US, but who cares, I`ll rip CD/DVD`s till the cows come home.

I`ll rip CD/DVD`s till the cows come home.

Well wait till you come up against the Cactus proctection they have put on the latest CD`s.........

And how long is it before that gets hacked, does DeCSS ring any bells?

Actually if this is the new protection scheme which is doing the rounds, it prevents playback in normal CDROM drives but not audio players. I think it fecks around with the error correction to prevent a direct digital copy. So its not a case of cracking it, because it defeats your CDROM drive at the hardware level.

A lot of people moaned and returned them to shops so they had to issue new unprotected versions if I recall.

Hmmmm...

Clayts - you sure `bout this?

Think the right to make `backups` is enshrined in the user license for software - i.e. programs that run on processors. Most, if not all user licenses, allow the user to backup the software - regardless of the media
(i.e. floppy, optical, Hard disk etc.,etc.)

DVDs (i.e `DVD Video`, `DVD Audio` and not games software etc.,simply distributed on DVD) on the other hand, have no such user license - they are governed by copywright (sp) and therefore not copy-able without the (c) owners permission.

One could argue that the DVD film content was `software` but I think the definition of software has been thrashed out legally already.

Or am I totally wrong here?

SN

The right to make a copy of software is actually part of the copyright directive, a single copy of any software, methinks it was put in when software was mostly distributed on a magnetic medium.

It`s copyright infringement if you copy a musical CD, even if you own it, even if its for your own use, even if its to go onto an MP3 player, even if its a backup, even if the CD is scratched and you manage to recover the songs, even if .... you get the drift? Not allowed, at all, unless for private study purposes or news reporting.