RIAA: Transferring Music From Legally Bought CD to Computer is Illegal Still Okay

We don’t normally post stuff like copyfight and the RIAA’s quest to quash music piracy through lawsuits (blogs like Boing Boing covered this subject well enough), but this recent article in the Washington Post is too good to pass up: apparently the RIAA now maintains that it’s illegal for you to transfer music from a legally bought CD to your computer!

In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

Link

Update 1/3/07: Apparently, the article was wrong: Jeffrey Howell was sued not because he ripped music from CDs to his computer, but for sharing them in a P2P basis. – Thanks Matthew McVickar!