Comment by count
15 years ago
Once you have a receipt from Apple for the music, you have proof of ownership.
If you accidentally lost the CD between then and the time you get your PC taken away for discovery in a copyright infringement lawsuit, that's plausible deniability.
At least, way more so than just having 2TB of MP3s laying around with no media you ripped them from at all...
The reality here seems to be, people don't get busted for the 2TB of unlawful music they keep on their hard drives. They get busted for the gigabytes of music they actively transmit on P2P networks. So while this is a valid geek conundrum, it may not be of any practical import.
Not really. Once you have a receipt from Apple, you have documentation that you used Apple's transcoding service.
If you accidentally lost 2TB worth of CDs between that time and the seizure of your PC, you're still going to have some explaining to do.
It would be like presuming guilt, you don't have to prove those mp3s are legal they have to prove that you stole them. Also having mp3s isn't the same as distributing mp3s. tptacek is right I believe. As far as I understand it, every p2p case has been about distribution or suspicion of distribution (make available argument). And they have to have a reason to come scan your computer. Hence why I won't be using this "scan and buy" service, the scan part is dumb.
Also as far as I know all my Amazon MP3 are identical to other users Amazon MP3 I don't think they have watermarks. How could you tell if they were mine or taken from someone.
In a civil prosecution (which is how copyright violation ought normally be handled, particularly at the individual consumer level) the burden of proof is usually only "the balance of probabilities" (i.e. more likely to be true than not be true), not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
(Of course, media companies would prefer that the government pass laws, pay for and implement the job of enforcing media company contracts, and this muddies the waters.)
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