Quote:
Originally Posted by keenite
is the use of Tunebite completely legal??
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I am not clear as to the answer to this question. I suspect that all song "rental" services (e.g., Zune Pass) have legal disclaimers stating that it is a violation of the terms of service to record by any means the media, since a subscriber is borrowing the media and not buying it for permanent storage... and if it is legal to use the Tunebite virtual "play-and-record" method then the greatest personal risk that one faces in doing so is to be banned from using the song rental service.
In my limited research I received the impression that the various arguments before judges have not yet reached a conclusion about recording a playback of a song for personal use/storage: anyone have some spare time and a JD/law background specializing in intellectual property violation claims?
It's not clear to me if the "play-and-record" DRM unlocking technologies out there (Tunebite, NoteBurner, etc.) violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention provisions or not, because: (A) No, it's not attempting to digitally break encryption schemes to unlock media; however, (B) if you read Wikipedia's article on the DMCA then it would seem that "circumvention" can be interpretted to mean any sort of circumvention, whether breaking an encryption scheme or other methods.
One thing that is clear: DRM licenses for the rental of music do not want the consumer to copy that music for permanent storage, and so by perhaps some degree of good faith they've opened up the majority (not all) of available songs for a nominal $9 to $15 per month (depending on your service provider)... keeping in mind that you could pay that much for one album, yet you have access to almost every album to "borrow" and play on anywhere from { 3 computers } to { 3 computers and 3 portable media players } depending on your service provider's terms of service. This seems reasonable, if you would normally buy 12 albums a year that is--if you figure at $9 to $15 per month that's like buying one album (120+ songs) every year, and if you would either not normally make such purchases per year (or do not normlly seek to play such a diversity of songs per year) then the service is getting the upper hand and you might want to avoid it, and consider instead spending $0.80 to $1.00 per song on an as-needed basis.
Whether or not it's legal to use a "play-and-record" technique to unlock a purchased song (vice borrowed song) is an entirely separate issue, though I personally lean towards the belief that "fair use" personal copies are appropriate in this case, as you are buying and not borrowing the song(s).
KCMD