(Sorry - big Judas Priest fan when I was younger)

I was on reddit.com this morning and came across this article from the US. The RIAA are, from what I can gather, now trying to state that ripping your own, legally bought, CDs to listen on your mp3 player is not legal. I am so glad I don’t live in America else I’d be in chains now as I spent yesterday morning ripping some of my CDs and will being doing most of the rest later - I’m getting a new mp3 player and wanted good quality files to transfer on to it.

One thing that I am concerned about is whether the UK will be going in the same direction. I did a quick Google search and found one article that, thankfully, seemed to point towards the UK making ripping your own CDs for your own personal use legal (article here). This is nearly two years old so if anyone out there knows of updates please let me know.

I feel that ripping CDs for personal use comes under ‘fair use policy’. I don’t want to download my music (legally or otherwise) as I prefer to have a physical product that I know I can go to whenever I want. Plus, I listen to my mp3s in the car or when I’m out walking but in the house I have a good stereo system to annoy the neighbours with (joking - kinda) so I need a CD for that. Besides which, record companies, and the artistes too I hope, are benefitting from the fact that I am slowly replacing my vinyl collection with CDs so paying twice for the same music. OK, maybe the quality will be better without the hisses and occasional scratch, but I’m still paying twice. I’d hate to have to pay three times so I could have an mp3 version!