I fought the law and the law?

[MonKeyRum]

I have an opened ended question of a hypothetical situation.

What if you had the knowledge and the ability to capture the audio from an audio stream that was broadcasted over the Internet. To make it even more interesting, the stream would come from a legitimate actual radio station that also broadcasts in FM in certain geographical regions.

Now you take that captured audio and cut it down into smaller chunks and then encoded them into mp3's for each individual song. After that you keep the files for personal use and not distribute them.

How could you be considered a criminal for not buying music when it was the company that approved the music to be given to the FM station and broadcasted freely?

[zootm]

You need the express permission of a radio station in order to record their content. Same goes for recording TV. Strictly speaking, you broke the law - even if it's rarely/never enforced.

[mark]

you broke the law by keeping a copy to listen to when you like. Same goes with taping the FM transmition.

[MonKeyRum]

When is that rule ever announced by the radio station?

[CaboWaboAddict]

They didn't make the rule, and, they are not obligated to announce it.

When a new traffic law is made, does anyone send you a message about it? You damn well better know about it though.

[Russ]

In the UK, it is legal to tape FM radio, and by extension it's legal to streamrip a licensed stream. I believe the same applies in the US.

[MonKeyRum]

Originally posted by CaboWaboAddict
They didn't make the rule, and, they are not obligated to announce it.

When a new traffic law is made, does anyone send you a message about it? You damn well better know about it though.

Your right in that regard but generally there is a public record of it so you can find it, I assume I could have also found the answer somewhere online.

But Russ brings up another point, what if its recorded from a country that it's not illegal to record streams

[zootm]

I somehow doubt "by association" will cut it (except in Scotland ). They'll never enforce it, in any case.

[MonKeyRum]

Here they come!!!

[ElChevelle]

Ripping streams is so ridiculous, it's unbelievable.
Like trying to burn a CD of an 8 track tape feed and expecting it to have CD quality.

Stupid, just plain stupid.

[MonKeyRum]

It is a dumb way to do things, but I'm just trying to say hypothetically that you can have mp3s that are classified as copyrighted music that are some how legal

[SSJ4 Gogitta]

It would be dumb if that were ALL stream rippers did, was rip streaming music. I use Total Recorder to record audio playing from DVDs, online news casts, and anything else my sound card is playing that I would like a quick copy of. Would also come in handy to record a streaming you like so you can listen to it later to get the lyrics and look up what the song is, expecially so if you can't remember it later, or you are like me, partially deaf, and need to repeat part of the song sevearl times to figure out what is being said.

[Russ]

Total Recorder is not a streamripper, in the strictest sense. There are plenty of programs about whose sole purpose is to simply get the content of the streams. The advantage with "proper" streamrippers is that they don't transcode.

[SSJ4 Gogitta]

Total Recorder doesn't transcode. The TR driver intercepts the audio data before it gets to the sound card driver.

[Russ]

Yes, but if you want to make it into an MP3 again, then you're transcoding.

[SSJ4 Gogitta]

well, obviouslly. But then again, there's FLAC...

[Russ]

Wheras with streamrippers you can just save the original MP3 stream straight to disk, and no transcoding is necessary. Anyhow, this is sort of offtopic.

[MonKeyRum]

I know what El is saying about quality, but that really the issue. When the RIAA knocks on your door I doubt they care about the quality of the mp3. My main point is that, I was looking for a way to say that an mp3 that is in your collection was legally obtained without buying the CD.

[Cognition]

The RIAA is after him and he needs an excuse to say his 10,000 mp3's are legal. "I didn't download them, I streamripped them!" :P

[deeder7001]

what's the difference between downloading mp3s and streamripping them? it's the same thing only without the p2p program.

[zootm]

Lower quality from streams, even at equal bitrates (because they'll probably be playing an already-encoded file down the stream).

As for morally, not much difference at all.

[griffinn]

Let's hope no legislator ever reads this thread and then closes the loophole.

[MonKeyRum]

yeah yeah griffinn knows, it's all about finding loopholes.