Since we're getting technical, I have a few questions if you have an opinion or know how the law applies exactly.
The first one is pretty straightforward, what about archiving a CD on your HDD that you checked out from the library? Is there a distinction made for temporary use? The analogy would be photocopying a page from a copyrighted library book "for personal use". It's also tangential to the debate of whether to use an e-reader for college textbooks, where e-texts are cheaper than a new hard copy, but you can't sell them back to the bookstore when you are done with it, or purchase a used hard copy from that same store in the first place.
Also, what about the distinction made for the profit motive, like if you give your CDs away as opposed to selling them after they are ripped?
This last one is a little more convoluted: this fall Apple will be rolling out their
iTunes Match feature as part of their new "iTunes in the Cloud" service. This "lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes...iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match...And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality."
It competes with similar services from Google and Amazon, the main difference is with those services you have to upload your whole library for cloud playback. Apple will charge $25 per year, Amazon between $50 and $200, and Google hasn't announced a price yet. In the case of Amazon, it would be pretty easy to track you if you have the music in their cloud, and then use their online store to sell of your original CDs. Or with Google, they could track you with Gmail confirmations of CDs sold!
So here's the question: After you upload your ripped library, can you theoretically sell off your original CDs and just use the cloud for $25 a year if you don't keep a local archive and still be technically within the law? Again, perhaps it would matter if you gave them away instead.
I would imagine that it's all spelled out in their terms and conditions
More of a thought exercise than a serious question,
as I would never do that.