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Originally Posted by cerbie /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Diamond. That is the first name that springs to mind. There is a case, merely eight or nine years old, where the big ol' dudes (that would be SCOTUS) said it's OK. What angle are they going to try to use to wiggle out of it?
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Recording Industrial Association of America v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. was decided in 1999 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The
Diamond Multimedia case did not directly address whether it is legal to rip one's own CDs to a hard drive for personal use. Instead, the decision focused on whether the Rio player was a "digital audio recording device" as defined by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. The RIAA was attempting to obtain an injunction stopping sales of the Rio because it did not employ the Serial Copy Management System required under the AHRA for any "digital audio recording device." RIAA argued, in essence, that the Rio was a "digital audio recording device" because it recorded music stored as MP3s on a computer hard drive. Both the trial court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this contention. The court held that the the Rio was not required to employ a Serial Copy Management System because it received MP3 files from a computer hard drive, and the express language of the statute makes it clear that the computer hard drives are not within the scope of the definition of "digital audio recording device" as defined by the AHRA. The court held, "Under the plain meaning of the Act's definition of digital audio recording devices, computers (and their hard drives) are not digital audio recording devices because their 'primary purpose' is not to make digital audio copied recordings."
The court then went on to make the following observation, which is relevant to this thread:
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| In fact, the Rio's operation is entirely consistent with the Act's main purpose -- the facilitation of personal use. As the Senate Report explains, "[t]he purpose of[the Act] is to ensure the right of consumers to make analog or digital audio recordings of copyrighted music for their private, noncommercial use." S. Rep. 102-294, at *86 (emphasis added). The Act does so through its home taping exemption, see 17 U.S.C.S 1008, which "protects all noncommercial copying by consumers of digital and analog musical recordings," H.R. Rep. 102-873(I), at *59. The Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or "space-shift," those files that already reside on a user's hard drive. Cf. Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 455 (1984) (holding that "time-shifting" of copyrighted television shows with VCR's constitutes fair use under the Copyright Act, and thus is not an infringement). Such copying is paradigmatic non-commercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act. |
The court then went on to discuss whether the Rio was capable of reproducing a digital music recording "from a transmission," which would also have subjected it to the provisions of the AHRA, and determined that the Rio did not have that capability.
There are several important things to note about the
Diamond Multimedia decision. First, unlike the
Sony decision that it references,
Diamond Multimedia was not decided by the United States Supreme Court, but by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Thus, its holding, strictly speaking, is not binding on federal courts elsewhere in the country, although it certainly constitutes what lawyers call "persuasive authority." Second, the case involved interpretation of the AHRA, and not interpretation of the Copyright Act. Though the portion that I've quoted above strongly suggests that the Ninth Circuit would find that ripping CDs to one's own computer for personal use falls within the fair use exception to the Copyright Act, that issue was not before the court, and the court's observation is thus arguably what lawyers call "dicta." Dicta is not a binding statement of the law.
