Elsewhere on the forum we have read that various overpaid (ohh did I say that) music organisations have to say about copying a track ONCE from one format to another....Lets pretend shall we? Yes?

OK....Lets pretend for a moment that the law states that it is OK to make ONE copy of any track you own, in any format, so long as you keep the original track in your possession, and not being played elsewhere at the same time.

You go out to a gig with your laptop, its a great gig and you arrive home to your house at 4am, only to find the garage door slightly ajar. Not how you left it. The rest of the house is untouched - the front door still locked, the personal door to the garage is ok too, but the garage has been cleared out whilst you were gigging...

The ride on mower, the families bikes, and...you've guessed it....your entire collection of original recordings.... Every tune which you spent ages and ages ripping onto your harddrive is gone, and lets face it the local police will be far too busy patroling that road thats recently been changed from 50mph to 40mph to bother to go wake up a few of the local "known" criminal fraturnity.

You think of tomorrows gig....and next weeks, and all the Christmas ones...phew! at least your laptop is still here, with all your tunes still intact...

Ah... Since the originals are no longer in your possession, you shouldnt really have the ripped tunes in your possession either.

As you dial the police on your mobile to report the break-in, you keep getting the image of having to select the "C:>_" drive, choose "Select All", "DELETE" and hovering the mouse pointer between "YES" and "NO" on the "Are you sure?" pop-up window. At the same time, your mind plays and re-plays an imaginary conversation with the hirers of your next few bookings..."Hello, this is your DJ, I've had a break-in, and I'm not going to be able to do your function...". The burglar could have taken ££££ away from you in future gig money and reputation/repeat gigs, not just the Excort van load of physical items.

More immediately, what if the police ask you why you didnt have all those records and CD's with you, as they're bound to ask where you were while the theft was taking place. Ok, its unlikely that they'll tell you to empty the laptop, but they'll probably scribble a note down about it, onto the police database...oh joy.

Even if your insurance(s) covers you for replacing every single CD, LP and single (not that they're all available any longer), you simply dont have the time to make the claim, wait for the cheque to arrive and buy all those tunes again, before all those gigs - its simply not possible.

Your fingers drum on your laptop bag as you contemplate your actions over the next few weeks? Maybe doing one gig with illegal tracks would be ok, you know, just tomorrows, maybe next weeks too.........


Over to you...

Tricky one
I'll get back to you.

I haven't got a laptop!

Just the same as if all my tracks get stolen really, what would I do then? Basically, I'd be stuck! I'd just have to go out and replace them!

Why not have the hypothetical law that lets us make 1 copy say if the originals get stolen we can still use the mp3.
No,what I think may help is having receipts.Not practical for most people but if starting up I would suggest keeping them,so if anything like this were to happen you would have some sort of proof.

taking the 5th

Love it - great dilemma Gary.

I guess the short answer for me would be to go ahead with the gigs, buying into something like the mastermix collections and other more easily accessible sources (although more expensive) to get things rolling again, thus showing an intent to put myself back into a legal position.

We all know that whether we have 1000 or 50000 tracks available the reality is that we're only ever gonna play 100 max at one gig.

I think this is where the law falls down and also most of the insurance policies, the financial implications are far less than the practicalities of replacing your music collection whatever the format.

For me the ideal would be to use backups with the originals placed in a vault. Having said that what if anything happened to the originals wherever they were.
Again, I think if you showed intent to replace you'd be treated accordingly.



Vinnie

Would rush out and buy new replacements immediately and then saw off my own foot as punishment for leaving them in the garage.

Move to Norway?!

Following the question I asked on another thread, has anybody Actually got their Vinyl / Cd collections insured??. I don't just mean assuming that they are included on your home contents policy since if it comes to paying out for them, it'll never happen - you may get a token £50 for the entire collection, but certainly not a CD for CD replacement.

Discodirect

I would use the ripped MP3s for the gig and start getting them again.

I know it's wrong, but why let everyone down.. Plus you can prove you owned them and had a burglary... Again, no real use in the eyes of the law, but you may get a nice Judge...

Also Chris - I have my CDs insured.. Musicguard for around £6-£7000...

The BEST place to keep your originals is in one of these new fangled storage depots. The proper ones give obscene amounts of insurance cover and are built like Fort Knox. It is basically like a huge bank safety box repository. Shove your CDs and most precious vinyl in there. Humidity controlled, 24 hour CCTV, swipe card main door entry, keypad number ID for the box..yadda ya.

Of course all this, er, assumes that it is legal to make a copy in the first place....ahem!

Now where did I put my swipe card again

Sell the rest of your kit, declare bankcruptsey (sp) and visit the soup kitchens for christmas (lol)

Ok...

But lets look at this another way...

If you have a PC with all your music on it, and you buy them from the net Legally, Are you allowed to backup this data?

What if your hard drive died !! God forbid... Does the insurance pay for a new drive and all the tracks to be re-downloaded???

I still take some cd's to each disco - incase the pc dies ! or there is another fault !!!

but i admit, the rest are at home !!

You raise a very valid point Chris, and of course the busy-bodies of the music industry are onto it.

There are plans afoot to have each and every CDROM (or other optical drive) and each and every hard drive have a unique identifier.

Future digital rights management formats (eg WMA) will have the ability to lock if they are not played on a combination of the hard drive identifier and the unique identifier associated with each pentium class chip.

There are lots of industry-standard type meetings going on before this is feasible however.

To be fair to the music industry they have a tiny point in saying that in The Future (great place, everything always seems better there) people will have access to such fantastic broadband connections that if they have a hardware issue with their licence, re-downloading will be relatively pain free.

As I keep on mentioning, the music industry's preferred model is renting, not ownership. In a rental model of music payment, the "repurchasing" aspect of downloading would be redundant anyway.