Any copyright lawyers lurking?

Once it becomes a DIGITAL item, the digital copyright act becomes a part of the equation. And i am certain it is not legal to transfer a digital copy of an item. Period.
I most certainly will not land you in jail, today. but the fact of doing it opens you to all sorts of theoretical problems lawyers love to charge big bucks saving your butt from.
One cannot resell a digital copy, even if you bought it, under the current act.
Loaning a digital copy is also verboten. (loaning the original download is OK, but only if it is still in the form and equipment you downloaded it to. so you would have to give the harddrive, or original files container of whatever sort to the other person, and even that is iffy.
And even if you made the copy, you do not own the copyright to the music.
Fair use is pretty much an unknown with digital stuff, and considering the DIRE penalites in the digital copyright act, i would be pretty quiet about doing anything.
I am not a lawyer.

Thanks for the replies. My initial feelings on this issue were closest to what Elizabeth so eloquently stated. I originally told my buddy that he could bring his albums over and record them for his use only. It does create an ironic inflection point whereby fair use of the purchased analog record could/might be superceded by the Digital Copyright Act...or vice versa. Who knows and I assure you I don't care enough about this potential pitfall to be a test case!

Thanks all

If your friend already has a copy of the product, why would he need yours? Just asking. I'm not an attorney, but if I were, I would start there.

Mike, excellent question. He has a decent copy of "Green Street" by Grant Green on Blue Note. A good recording on decent vinyl....several scratches but nothing out of the ordinary. I have the Hoffman/Gray Acoustech remastered reissue from Blue note on 200g vinyl 45 rpm. I ripped my copy to my computer using DSD and then ripped it down to multiple sample rates to see if I could hear a material difference. I enlisted his ears to assist me....not really a blind test but he didnt know which version was playing. He was astounded at every sample rate and asked me to give him the files. We then discussed the slippery slope. We jointly surmised that to follow the letter of the law, he would need to "borrow" my album and its "digital archive" for evaluation in his system.

Now i have no intention of distributing digital copies of my music to anyone but i dont see anything wrong with loaning them mine or assisting them by recording their album. In this case what really caused me to pause, and a key fact that i intentionally did not mention initially in this posting, was that I would believe my remastered Grant Green album to be a "different" recording than what he has. It just started me thinking and i thought i would pose the question to the audiophile community and get some broad, generic input. Regards

Sounds like a great rip. It should be posted to the "Green Monster"