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> I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume That may cover many people, but GP's post seems different. They went o

> I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume That may cover many people, but GP's post seems different. They went out of their way to "digitize their [presumably bought] collection" just to be able to avoid ads. This doesn't sound at all like "not paying for the content", they're actually paying above the content: I don't think the NAS comes from the pirate bay. We've actually seen this in practice: when Netflix was the only game in town and carried everything ad-free, piracy cratered. Now that all the paid providers are beginning to show ads, and you have to have 50 different subscriptions to watch what you want, piracy looks better again. I don't watch many movies / series / videos, so I'm happy with what I get with my Prime subscription, which I'd have either way. But now that more and more of my Spotify tracks are "not available in my region" anymore, I'm seriously starting to investigate alternatives. Spoiler: it's not another streaming provider. Rather, looking to buy a bunch of hard drives and dusting off my old cd player, so I can rip whatever CDs I can get my hands on at second-hand stores around me.

hotpotamus 4y ago
I doubt the media company lawyers would see it that way. And while they're ghouls, they'd have a point too. What counts as paying? I've got a colleague who would never download a movie illegally; he simply has a constant stream of Netflix DVDs (they're still doing that in case you thought that business was totally dead) that he rips and then sends back. He's paying someone for content, right?
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  I think the difference is that if you buy the cd, even second hand, and keep it, you're fine because you own it. At least in Europe, there's the whole "personal copy tax" that's levied on all storage media as well as a "private copying exception" to copyright law.
  - buzer 4y ago
    In Finland you are not allowed make a copy if you need to bypass a strong copy protection. According to decision from 2008 from appeals court (supreme court did not grant appeal) DVD's CSS is considered to be such. Given that it's not very strong from technical point of view and that pretty much all CDs do contain some form of copy protection it's hard to say if you are allowed to make personal copies of most of the commercial CDs.
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      Fair enough. I don't really care for movies, so I wouldn't go through that trouble, but I don't recall having encountered any audio CD with copy protection. Would those work in a regular, old-style cd-player, like, say, in a stereo?
      - buzer 4y ago
        There has been various ones over the years. These include e.g. key2Audio, Cactus Data Shield & Copy Control. They generally played without issues on normal CD players, but I did hear that especially car stereos did sometimes have issues with them. The way most of them worked were by attempting to hide the audio tracks from computer CD drives to make the ripping harder. I haven't really used audio CDs for ~15 years so I don't know what the situation is these days. At least the technologies I mentioned are no longer being used to according to Wikipedia. One way to tell if the disc has these kind of copy protections or not is to check if it has the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. It's trademarked and Philips does not allow using the logo for CDs that break the specification. They do however allow setting the "no copy" bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit). No clue if that would be strong copy protection or not in Finnish courts.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I doubt the media company lawyers would see it that way. And while they're ghouls, they'd have a point too. What counts as paying? I've got a colleague who would never download a movie illegally; he simply has a constant stream of Netflix DVDs (they're still doing that in case you thought that business was totally dead) that he rips and then sends back. He's paying someone for content, right?

vladvasiliu 4y ago
I think the difference is that if you buy the cd, even second hand, and keep it, you're fine because you own it. At least in Europe, there's the whole "personal copy tax" that's levied on all storage media as well as a "private copying exception" to copyright law.
- buzer 4y ago
  In Finland you are not allowed make a copy if you need to bypass a strong copy protection. According to decision from 2008 from appeals court (supreme court did not grant appeal) DVD's CSS is considered to be such. Given that it's not very strong from technical point of view and that pretty much all CDs do contain some form of copy protection it's hard to say if you are allowed to make personal copies of most of the commercial CDs.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    Fair enough. I don't really care for movies, so I wouldn't go through that trouble, but I don't recall having encountered any audio CD with copy protection. Would those work in a regular, old-style cd-player, like, say, in a stereo?
    - buzer 4y ago
      There has been various ones over the years. These include e.g. key2Audio, Cactus Data Shield & Copy Control. They generally played without issues on normal CD players, but I did hear that especially car stereos did sometimes have issues with them. The way most of them worked were by attempting to hide the audio tracks from computer CD drives to make the ripping harder. I haven't really used audio CDs for ~15 years so I don't know what the situation is these days. At least the technologies I mentioned are no longer being used to according to Wikipedia. One way to tell if the disc has these kind of copy protections or not is to check if it has the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. It's trademarked and Philips does not allow using the logo for CDs that break the specification. They do however allow setting the "no copy" bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit). No clue if that would be strong copy protection or not in Finnish courts.