talkmagic.co.uk

But if you were to download something that wasn't for sale and being distributed over torrent sites BY THE OWNER then they would have a hard time getting you for it, I would say

Visiting torrent sites (even the dodgiest) and torrenting aren't illegal per se. It's just that torrent technology is used illegally most of the time.

As Spooney said, anything that's been legitimately released into the public domain -- either by the owner, or because copyright has expired -- is perfectly legal to copy and share. Project Gutenberg, for instance, distributes its compilation DVDs as torrents. There are even a few strictly legal torrent sites that carry only public domain and shareware.

Personal backup copies are a grey area where your conscience will have to be your guide. I own a few mis-manufactured and damaged disks. The desktop computer can usually cope with the irregularities but sometimes hangs up, and my laptop can't handle them at all. In such a case, the authorities will turn a blind eye to a working copy as long as you keep the original. The same goes for ripping and other kinds of re-formatting.

If the original is out of your possession for any reason (sold, lost, stolen, or never yours to begin with) then it's illegal to have a copy.

Only a "court of record" can determine if something is illegal or not. Not me, not you, not a solicitor and certainly not the police or sony for that matter.

I'm minded to think about the Sony rep who said that if you want to put your (digital) music onto two physically separate devices, then you need to pay for two copies. Obviously this goes against common sense and is a perverse interpretation, but at the end of the day if you are going to purchase a licence to listen to something (rather than a physical disc) then you need to accept that the residual value of your high puchase-price collection will be practically nil.

You are certainly in murky waters when it comes to grabbing a dvd that has already been processed so that you can play it on devices that the original publisher never intended. It's all about control and money. That's why if you torrent a sony product you may get prosecuted, while L&L don't have the funds.

By the way, this post is (c) 2009 to me, so please respect my copyright and don't read it.

More to the point, we've had these discussions in various forms many times before.