- Space shifting
Space shifting is a concept that has been argued in
copyright law to permit owners of some form of media, such as a song or movie, to convert that media from one format to another, generally by converting anaudiotape ,videotape ,compact disc , orDVD into an electronic file stored on a computer. The term is argued as an analogy to thetime shifting argument that succeeded inSony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. , 464 U.S. 417 (1984 ), in which theUnited States Supreme Court held that the sale of VCRs did not contribute to copyright infringement because taping a televised event to watch at a later time was not an infringing activity.In
Recording Indus. Ass’n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc. , 180 F.3d 1072, 1079 (9th Cir. 1999), theNinth Circuit Court of Appeals applied the "space shifting" argument in the context of the Rio device (a portable MP3 player). "Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or 'space-shift,' those files that already reside on a user’s hard drive. . . . Such copying is a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use."On the other hand, the space shifting argument was rejected by the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in "A & M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. " 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001 ), but only in the context of converting media to electronic files that are to be stored in a system where they are widely available to be copied. In UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc., 92 F. Supp. 2d 349 (S.D.N.Y. 2000 ), the court also rejected space shifting, stating that consumer protection or convenience was not paramount in copyright law, but rather protecting the rights of the copyright holders.The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in "In re Aimster", also discussed (hypothetically) the propriety of space shifting:
Someone might own a popular-music CD that he was particularly fond of, but he had not downloaded it into his computer and now he finds himself out of town but with this laptop and he wants to listen to the CD, so he uses Aimster’s service to download a copy. This might be a fair use rather than a copyright infringement, by analogy to the time shifting approved as fair use in the "Sony" case. . . . The analogy was rejected in "UMG Recordings v. MP3.com, Inc." . . . on the ground that the copy on the defendant's server was an unauthorized derivative work; a solider ground, in light of "Sony"’s rejection of the parallel argument with respect to time shifting, would have been that the defendant’s method for requiring that its customers "prove" that they owned the CDs containing the music they wanted to download was too lax.
334 F.3d at 652-653.External links
* [http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/180_F3d_1072.htm RIAA vs. Diamond]
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