It depends on the copyright owner and the license agreement. Some license agreements clearly states that you are not allowed to copy the disc for whatever reason, being it only for personal backups or whatever.[/i]

There are a lot of differing opinions on how things go. Of course the recording industry associations want to make you pay as much for every little thing as they can milk out of you.

They screw both sides, the artists and the consumer and then try to blame all their money wasted on legal action as the fault of the consumer. I still maintain that they should completely stop this. If they used all their money to take down spammers instead, public opinion of the industry would go up so much and I imagine plenty of people would buy records to support them.

Personally, I prefer to buy music from smaller groups who treat their customers as customers and not criminals. The recording industries use illegal activities (from hacking to circulating falsified research) to entrap and attack the very people who are supposed to buy from them.

License agreements for discs, audio and software etc can easily be challenged in this country by the courts. We have the Office of Fair Trading and fair use principals.

In my opinion, a large portion of piracy that occurs on the Internet costs the industry nothing as if they couldn't download it then the people wouldn't buy it anyway.

Even people like The Who initially wanted the Internet to be a mechanism for sharing free music (see the song Relay from the 70s). I am part of a community that shares its music through the likes of Youtube. We still go and buy the CDs of people we like though to support them. The music is good and cheaper but the money goes straight to the artists

Check out the likes of candyrat.com

There are major differences between the industry lobbyists, the creative idealists and the legal stance. Let's hope that it works out better for everyone in the end not just the industry churning out the next boy/girl band.

if you copy it, KEEP IT A SECRET, and if you don't sucks to be you, DVDFAB FTW