Redbook Keeps Surprising

For those of you who are ripping your CD's to hard drives, and then either donating the CD's to thrift stores, or selling them cheap at garage sales or to used record stores, my friends and I would like to say THANK YOU.  

So, let's see if I have this right ... If I burn a copy of a CD that I own to play in my car for personal enjoyment, I'm okay as far as "the law" is concerned. But ... If I play the burned CD in my car for awhile, then give it to a friend at no charge, just as a gift, then I'm an "unethical" person?

If I have an expensive bicycle that I replace with a new one, and I give my old bicycle to a valued friend at no cost, am I then somehow "cheating" the manufacturer of the old bicycle out of a sale? How about if I sell my old bicycle to a private party ... does that make me an "unethical person?" 

I like the philosophy of The Grateful Dead ... "Once out into the air, it is  no longer ours, it belongs to our fans."  They even allowed private recordings to be  taken at their live concerts. That's why we have so many Grateful Dead bootlegs. 

My take?  If I buy a new CD, the musician makes money. The CD at that point is my personal property. It no longer is the property of the musician or the studio that produced it.  It is mine to do with what I want. The musician doesn't deserve to make money in perpetuity on resale, after resale, after resale of the same CD. No more than the bicycle manufacturer deserves to make money from subsequent resale of used bicycles. 

There are just too damned many attorneys who are desperate for work out there ... and they are grinding the country to a halt with their rules and regulations.  

Enough is enough ... 

OP

^^^ And by the way, Redbook CD's can sound fantastic when played back through a highly resolving system.

 One key is to find the recordings that were done by a recording engineer who kept his hands off of the control panel knobs and has left the reverb dial alone ... and just lets the natural sound of the recording come through. Those are the CD's that sound terrific.

So, what are we supposed to do to remain "ethical?" Are we supposed to buy fifty crappy sounding CD's until we find one that's worth keeping? And what is the "ethical" thing to do with the crappy sounding ones? Would that be to just throw them in the trash? Would it be to just accept the crappy sounding ones and  learn to live with them? 

I submit that the unethical ones are those who own the studios that produce crappy sounding digital recordings and then gouge the public for an inferior product. They have become their own worst enemy.  

Let's get it straight ... Most of the studios today are run by a bunch of bean counters who couldn't care less about the end user. For them, its all about the money, and nothing else. 

OP

Okay ... I like to make cassette copies of some of my favorite vinyl LP's and play them in my car ... especially on road trips.  Am I violating copyright law in this instance?  

What if I make a cassette copy of an LP and give it to a friend?  Or, how about if I rip an LP to a CD disc, then play the CD in my car ... or give the CD to a friend?  Is that against the law too?

In fact, just this morning I ripped two LPs to one CD disc ... a  mono copy of a Woody Herman LP, long out of print, and a mono copy of a Tony Scott LP, also long out of print. Then, I ripped the copied CD to another CD ... now there's one CD for my car and one CD for a friend who requested it after hearing both LP's on my system last night. 

Thousands of used CD's are sold on Ebay and Amazon each week, so that must be legal it seems. 

There are thousands of CD recorders sold ... I have the home version of the Tascam Pro made by TEAC.  If its illegal to make a copy of a music CD ... why are Tascam and TEAC in business?  I have installed a good program on my PC that makes excellent copies of CD's. Why is that software maker and the computer maker still in business? 

While I have purchased countless numbers of used CDs via Ebay, from thrift stores and garage sales, I have never sold a copy to anyone. I am not in the recording resale business. 

 Ethics?  Um ... how many posting here remember when CD's first came out? Remember when all of the vinyl was stripped from the record store shelves almost over night and everything was replaced by CD's at $18.99 a pop for terrible sounding digital recordings? No violations of ethics by leaving the consumer with no choice other than to pay exorbitant prices for a lousy product, eh? 

Ethics?  How may posting here are sick and tired of buying full price CD's, only to get them home to find that they are drenched in digital reverb, have screechy strings and are pretty much unlistenable ... unless one finds running dental floss through one's ears enjoyable? 

Ethics?  Okay, so I guess in order to really be on the up and up, I'll have to start telling my friends to go pay collector prices for the out of print stuff and just forget me making any copies for them of the absolutely unattainable stuff too.  Oh, and no more copies for the car either. 

Crapolla, we certainly live in a complicated, over-regulated statist world, do we not?  

I think I'm getting old. 

OP

Cleeds ...

Yes, I have a low mileage 2005 (just turned 64,000) Lexus LS 400 that has a Mark Levinson sound system in it. You should hear how it sounds when a really clean vinyl record is recorded onto cassette and then played back on a good car system like the Mark Levinson.   Nothing "quaint" about it really. Nostalgic maybe, but not quaint.  Just as a point of interest, I have a cassette recording of a live broadcast of a piano/cello duo that I recorded off of my FM tuner years ago. That darned recording sounds like the cello is in the car. No joke.  

Cleeds ...

No offense taken at all. :-)

I just wanted to make the point of how good cassettes can sound in the car environment. I also have transferred all of my best sales training cassettes over to CD's. 

This has been a very interesting thread.  

I have a question though. If some of you are ripping red book CD's to a hard drive, then donating or selling the original CD's, aren't you worried that your hard drive will crash at some future date and all of your music will be lost and your hard work will be for naught? 

OP