RIAA in Grokster: ok to copy CDs for personal use

There was an apparently unexpected concession from the music industry lawyer, Donald Verilli, in the MGM v Grokster hearing before the US Supreme Court last week. If you can get hold of the transcript, on page 12 beginning at line 3, he says "The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it on your iPod."

And sure enough if you check the RIAA site now, you can find this:

"What is your stand on MP3?

This is one of those urban myths like alligators in the toilet. MP3 is just a technology and the technology itself never did anything wrong! There are lots of legal MP3s from great artists on many, many online sites. The problem is that some people use MP3 to take one copy of an album and make that copy available on the Internet for hundreds of thousands of people. That's not fair. If you choose to take your own CDs and make copies for yourself on your computer or portable music player, that's great. It's your music and we want you to enjoy it at home, at work, in the car and on the jogging trail. But the fact that technology exists to enable unlimited Internet distribution of music copies doesn't make it right. "

In the US it is lawful to make copies for personal use but the entertainment industry have generally been reluctant to concede this in the PR battle that constitutes the copyright wars. I've no idea how long this faq has been on the RIAA site (The Internet Archive suggests since June 2003). As late as November last year, the head of the RIAA legal department, Stan Pierre-Louis, was saying that copying CDs to a computer hard drive and then to an iPod was copyright infringement.

What's fascinating is that many of the smart advocates opposing the music industry were unaware of it too. Just goes to show how the rhetoric can come to dominate and interfere with the process of negotiating a reasonable way forward. With protagonists on both sides focussing on the extremes, the middle ground gets neglected. The cynics, of course, will say that it is the pulling the rabbit out of the hat act on the part of the RIAA – making an apparent concession now in an attempt to demonstrate reasonableness.

Of course this apparent concession to recognise the current state of the law does raise the question of whether the RIAA would think it was "great" to bypass the drm (copy protection) increasingly found on commercial CDs in order to make a personal copy.