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SACD Ripping--Is It Legal?

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Posted on October 20, 2014 at 11:03:58
Vade Forrester
Reviewer

Posts: 73
Location: Texas
Joined: February 23, 2010
I've seen an ad for a service which will rip SACDs to DSD. Is that legal? Or is it prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? I've got several SACDs I'd like to play in hi-res, but no decent SACD player. If I could access the DSD files and play them on my music server, it would be nice. I have no intention of distributing the DSD copies to anyone else. I really don't want to repurchase the albums in high-res versions. Some are only available as SACDs.

Note: I'm not asking if the DMCA is right, ethical, moral, etc.

 

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RE: SACD Ripping--Is It Legal?, posted on October 20, 2014 at 14:45:16
Fitzcaraldo215
Audiophile

Posts: 1120
Location: Philadelphia
Joined: September 7, 2008
No, I do not think it is technically, any more than exceeding the speed limit on highways is. You never exceed the posted limit, I presume. For that matter, ripping CDs, etc. isn't legal, either. Neither is putting a book or magazine in a copy machine so that you can have an excerpt of a few pages. But, ripping or copying is a civil, not a criminal offense. And, as a practical matter, enforcement is near impossible. Pandora's box has been opened. So, as long as you do not try to make a public, commercial venture of redistributing your rips, there is nothing to lose sleep over. There are not enough attorneys, judges, prosecutors and juries in the world to track down and try the huge numbers of transgressors who rip stuff for their own personal use.

 

RE: SACD Ripping--Is It Legal?, posted on October 21, 2014 at 04:31:37
lokie
Audiophile

Posts: 1986
Location: Georgia, USA
Joined: January 28, 2003
"There are not enough attorneys, judges, prosecutors and juries in the world to track down and try the huge numbers of transgressors who rip stuff for their own personal use."

They could start w 90% of the high-school and collegiate population.

 

RE: SACD Ripping--Is It Legal?, posted on October 21, 2014 at 06:06:37
fantja
Audiophile

Posts: 15486
Location: Alabama
Joined: September 11, 2010
So long as you do not have an interest in selling the ripped product(s).
Go for it!

 

RE: SACD Ripping--Is It Legal?, posted on October 22, 2014 at 13:15:37
PaulN
Audiophile

Posts: 1412
Joined: January 13, 2000
yes it is. Because the DSD layer on an SACD is encrypted, ripping an SACD to file requires circumvention of a technological barrier.

In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") has implemented the treaty provisions regarding the circumvention of some technological barriers to copying intellectual property.

Circumvention of Access Controls[edit]
Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:

No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

The Act defines what it means in Section 1201(a)(3):

(3) As used in this subsection—

(A) to "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and

(B) a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Thus, if there is some "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work", it is illegal to circumvent that measure. However, Section 1201 creates several exceptions to this rule, and the Library of Congress is empowered to create additional exceptions.

 

RE: SACD Ripping--Is It Legal?, posted on October 24, 2014 at 06:31:44
ted_b
Audiophile

Posts: 803
Joined: January 14, 2001
PaulN,
"yes it is"? I would think your response (cut and paste of DMCA) to your subject title (SACD RIpping -Is It Legal?) would be "no, it isn't". Small detail.

BTW, the DMCA also has anti-circumvention wording that makes DVD ripping and overall space shifting illegal.

Net/net, keep all your digital library to yourself and off the public market, be it torrents, selling (of course), etc. And don't sell your physical cds once you rip them; that is QUITE illegal. Same with hard drives or pcs full of music.

 

RE: SACD Ripping--Is It Legal?, posted on October 24, 2014 at 09:32:49
PaulN
Audiophile

Posts: 1412
Joined: January 13, 2000
Well, truthfully, it's all sort of a moot point. Pandora's Box has been open for quite awhile and there will probably be a return to a better fair use interpretation at some point that acknowledges the reality, the industry wrote the DMCA and the exceptions codified the SC cases providing fair use for VHS and cassette tapes at the point both were clearly obsolete. But the industry eventually gets handed a losses in the courts. But, you are correct, I responded to the question is it illegal, not is it legal. Personally, I have a rather small library and have never been drawn to file-sharing but I recognize that there are a lot of people that do use the torrents and they should know that copyright law does render that activity illegal.

 

So what happened to "fair use"?, posted on October 24, 2014 at 14:49:04
mark111
Audiophile

Posts: 4699
Joined: April 12, 2002
It was established in the 1970s IIRC ,that people could make copies of recorded material for there personal use.
enjoy,
mark

 

RE: So what happened to "fair use"?, posted on October 24, 2014 at 15:05:42
PaulN
Audiophile

Posts: 1412
Joined: January 13, 2000
When you let industry write your legislation, you get the laws you deserve. In this case, fair use provisions have been eroded systematically over the last 15 years. The DMCA's anti-circumvention language effectively rendered fair use of your own digital content moot, because you can't access it without implementing a circumvention of a protection mechanism. Cd's are not encrypted, so they fall under fair use, but DVDs blu rays, and SACds all have forms of encryption. Analog reproducing means such as VCRs, cassettes and LPs do not. So, you can still make a mix tape under fair use, but it is technically illegal to rip a DVD or blurry that you purchased to a media server. That is why there is the Ultraviolet service. It licenses coppies. In some sense, the advancement of downloads, particularly DSD downloads (which are not encrypted) acknowledges the reality that exits. When honest fair use gets legislated out of reality, the population just proceeds illegally, thumbing its nose at the copyright holders. Hence the hacking of the PS3. Most people are not interested in wholesale abuse of copyright, they just want to be able to use their purchases in the most convenient manner, and for a lot us us out here, that means using files rather than hard media. Eventually, the law will catch back up to the reality, but its going to take a good SC case and no meddling again from Congress.

 

Thanks, posted on October 24, 2014 at 15:42:59
mark111
Audiophile

Posts: 4699
Joined: April 12, 2002
I didn't realize the laws had "evolved" to that extant.
enjoy,
mark

 

RE: SACD Ripping--Is It Legal?, posted on October 25, 2014 at 13:47:53
Artoa
Audiophile

Posts: 81
Joined: March 12, 2011
Should you want to try for yourself, there's a PS3 capable of ripping for sale on the Asylum Trader.

 

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