International copyright laws say it's all right do some forms of music copying...and not all right to do others. But a battle among giants is rewriting the limits. When it's all over, will you have any rights at all?

If you buy a record, you own it -- it seems to be common sense. No one can tell you what to do with it. But then you think about it, and the limitations on this principle become obvious. If you really owned it, you could burn a thousand copies on your computer and hawk them on the street. In fact if you do that, you can end up in jail. Conclusion: you own the record (that is to say, the round piece of polycarbonate), but you don't own the music recorded on it.
     Indeed, manufacturers of computer software have long made the ownership limit explicit. It seems you have not bought the software, but rather a license to use it. A typical license (to which you must agree in order to install the software) may read like this:
     You may Install and use the Software on a single computer; OR install and store the Software on a storage device, such as a network server, used only to install the Software on your other computers over an internal network, provided you have a license for each separate computer on which the Software is installed and run.  A license for the Software may not be shared or used concurrently on different computers.
     You may make one copy of the Software in machine-readable form solely for backup purposes. You must reproduce on any such copy all copyright notices and any other proprietary legends on the original copy of the Software.
     You may not rent, lease, or sublicense the Software.
     And here's the part we especially like:
     In the event that you fail to comply with this license, (the company) may terminate the license and you must destroy all copies of the Software.
     Yes, that means you are expected to destroy software that you thought you had bought!
     Record companies don't yet have such high-handed license agreements, nor do they warn you that by breaking the shrink wrap you are accepting all the terms of the "agreement" (if they did, there wouldn't be room on the box for the name of the artists). Nonetheless, they believe that your rights end with actually listening to the record.
     And that opinion is not a recent one. In 1976, Sony, whose Betamax VCR was then new, was sued by two of the major movie studios, Universal and Disney, for making a machine whose clear purpose was to allow copying of copyrighted material. The studio suit was based on the assumption that people who recorded TV shows for later viewing in the privacy of their own homes were violating the law, and infringing on the rights of the producers. Sony won the suit the following year but then lost on appeal. It was only in 1984 that the US Supreme Court ruled that '"time shifting,'" taping programs for viewing at a more convenient time, was fair use and did not contravene the law. No other country attempted to outlaw the VCR, and indeed some of those film studios owe their continued existence to the awesome earnings from sales and rentals of videocassettes.
     The "Betamax case" is still frequently referred to, because the language of the US Supreme Court decision had clear implications for all technologies permitting the duplication of films, music and other copyrighted materials. The court seemed to be saying that private copying for home use was acceptable. That interpretation would later influence new copyright laws in the US and in a number of other countries.
     In the years that followed, there was an explosion of hardware whose very purpose was home copying. The most ubiquitous is the double-well cassette deck. More recently, we have seen CD player/cassette deck combinations. What are they for, if not the copying of (presumably) copyrighted material? What's more, some of this copying gear is marketed by corporations that also make records. Sony is one of them. Philips and Panasonic are no longer in the record business, but when they were they were nonetheless making equipment that could be used only for copying.

The digital challenge
     As noted, the feared VCR turned out to be a bonanza for the film studios, which are branches of the record companies. Besides, this technologically limited equipment was clearly incapable of making high quality copies. A second generation videocassette is snowy with typically poor color. A copy of an audiocassette -- typically made on a boombox without even the benefit of noise reduction -- is even worse. It is easy to consider such copies as being mere demo quality, possibly serving to whet the appetite of consumers for the commercial product.
     That, indeed, is the reason record companies give free copies of their product to radio stations. However there are limits. A couple of decades ago, the record companies threatened retribution against stations that scheduled the playing of entire album sides uninterrupted, allowing easy copying.
     The arrival of digital sound changed everything.
     Though audiophiles have long had reservations about the low resolution of the Compact Disc, the information on the disc was often a copy of the original master recording. It could be copied and recopied many times with little perceptible loss. That meant anyone with $15 to spend could buy a virtually exact copy of a master tape that might have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. It was a boon to pirates, who could make small fortunes by mass-producing bootleg copies of best-selling hits. And they did.
     The record industry has had only limited success against the industrial pirates, who have access to top technology and who often operate in countries with lax copyright laws or no laws at all. Close them down and they pop up elsewhere. Fines against record stores that knowingly sell copies have had little effect.
     Frustrated with this lack of progress, the industry has been training its sights on what seems on the surface like a much smaller threat: casual copying by consumers.

Sabotaged technology
     Until a few years ago making a CD was virtually impossible for individuals. CD recorders were expensive, blank CD's cost typically over $40, and even optimistic projections pointed to an eventual selling price of US$5. As for equipment for pressing CD's, it could then run into the millions.
     But then came Digital Audio Tape, which -- ironically -- was invented by Sony, which is also a record company. Blank DAT cassettes were also expensive to purchase, but it was evident that growing production could eventually bring the price down. And, unlike the analog cassette, a DAT machine could make a virtually perfect digital copy of a Compact Disc.
     At least it could have, if Sony had not chosen to cripple its brainchild fatally. Full-featured DAT recorders were reserved for professionals. Consumer DAT's were made so they could not record at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. Since that is the sampling rate of the CD, a DAT recorder could copy a CD only through its analog inputs. The sound would be slightly degraded even to the ears of a non-critical listener, and copying a copy would cause even more damage. This sabotage killed the consumer version of the DAT format, which caught on only in pro audio circles.
     Clearly it wasn't considered safe to trust consumers with anything that would make a "perfect" copy of a commercial recording, but perhaps they could be persuaded to adopt another crippled system. Sony and Philips, the originators of the CD, went their own way, introducing competing systems, MiniDisc and DCC (Digital Compact Cassette).
     The MiniDisc, with its CD-like random access, seemed to have an advantage over the clumsier DCC, but in fact both systems shared a disadvantage...or an advantage depending on your point of view. They recorded with '"lossy compression,'" which means they discarded most of the audio information on the grounds that it was "inaudible." Though the companies had some success convincing consumers that the result was close to CD quality, it was evident that copying a copy on either system would be disastrous.
     However consumers quickly figured that out too, and both systems failed. DCC is completely dead, save in its native Netherlands where it carries on in extremely marginal fashion. MiniDisc was ultimately relaunched in an improved form, but by then CD-R and MP3 had appeared. Neither of the new systems was crippled, and neither could be controlled by the record companies.
     The initial result was panic at the record company executive suites...and a legal counterattack that would cost the record companies some of its staunchest allies.
     One likely result is that the right to make copies of records you have bought for your own use, a right recognized by law in many countries, may disappear. To follow this increasingly dramatic story, read on...

(This is an excerpt from the original six-page article. The article goes on to specify what is legal and what is not (according to the international treaty and the famous/infamous US law), the technology that may be used to prevent you from copying records, and the reason some recording artists are not backing the record industry on this matter. To read the entire report, just order issue 62 at our secure server.)

Complete articles from this issue:
Vecteur I-4 integrated amplifier, Antique Sound Lab passive preamp, State of the Art

Excerpted articles from this issue:
Copy Right!, DVD for Your Future, Vecteur L-4 player, Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista amplifier, SimAudio Moon Attraction, Creek OBH-12, Two Interconnects, Antique Sound Lab amplifier