and to the people who are actually checking cds out, using them constantly, eventually scratching them and getting them dirty, and letting them sit around and get damaged under a pile of crap for a couple weeks and often losing them in the process, stop it, that’s less music I get to hear.

I just cannot believe the shortsighted responses from people to this article, they are so totally ignorant. For instance, borrowing a book and reading it takes money out of the publisher’s hands. Book stores are closing every day just like music shops, so they’re definitely just as liable to be damaged by libraries. You check out a book, read it, that’s STEALING, you are STEALING. Buying a used book for yourself? Perfectly suitable. Checking said book from library, reading it, and never buying a copy? STEALING. You are taking food out of hungry authors’ mouths! When did music become such a focus that you forgot that libraries are inherently immoral like this, that they do not send royalties for every checked out book, and for twenty people, forty people, sixty people checking out a book, libraries are costing the publisher and author THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. Really, I mean, are you expletive serious? You have to be JOKING.
I BUY all my books, especially classics, but also new authors, and manga. I support authors. Authors have a much harder time than a lot of music artists, they’re much less exposed on radio, tv, the internet, media in general.
And yet here’s the rub, when you let people check out cds, books, dvds, you are EXPOSING them to this media. When someone listens to a cd of a group, rips their cd to their computer, and listens to it and enjoys it, they become a fan, and are more liable to spend money towards new albums, shows, or earn artists royalties by watching music videos on tv or the internet, by running up advertising revenue for said artist.
I can tell you that there’s a lot of music/artists I wouldn’t even know about without the library, god bless it. I buy TONS of music, and also rip cds from the library. I LOVE music, and generally ripping cds keeps me from buying too much music and going bankrupt. I spend money on remasters, box sets, used cds, new cds; generally, if I like the artist, I will either watch a video on you tube or buy their album. I’m also now buying cds which the library USED to have and no longer has, especially expensive box sets which patrons either ruined or stole, like those Grateful Dead Complete albums sets which are wonderful.
Of course now that I’m not in high school/college anymore and I can actually afford some things, I’d rather have a pristine cd in any case. There’s something sorta dirty about putting a blank cd in a spiffy cd player.
I might also mention that the poor of yesterday become the wealthy of tomorrow, and they might go back and buy some of the things they supposedly–LOL–stole. And the people who are below the poverty line and cannot afford such luxury items and for whom the library is one of the few ways they can stay absorbed in our culture, I look forward not to the day libraries dimwittingly ban cds, dvds, or even books, or essentially cease to exist altogether.

Of course a teacher who rips a bunch of cds anyways, well, look how much we’re paying these people who we supposedly VALUE so highly? On a teacher’s pay? They’re lucky to pay their mortgage every month.

There _may be_ times when ripping CDs from the library could be a fair use. But it would not always or inevitably be so.

Home taping of music was more clearly legally permissible because of a licensing fee levied on all blank audiotapes. You can still buy “music” blank CDs that cost slightly more than “data” blanks; the price difference is because licensing fees are being paid back to music rightsholders. But even if you buy “music” blanks today, the record companies think you should have to pay _again_ to get media in a new format or on a new device.

Unless I’m much mistaken, this is one of a few specific cases of copyright infringement that’s actually protected by law – it’s known as “format shifting”, which is protected in order to allow people to convert media from one format to another for personal use.

It’d be no different if, for example, he hooked a portable CD player up to a portable tape recorder and made copies of the CDs that way, or if he’d borrowed a DVD box set and used a DVD-ripping progam to copy the video to his computer.

Now, if this particular patron were then to take all of the copies he’d made of these CDs and uploaded them to a file-hosting website like Megaupload – or fired up a peer-to-peer file-sharing program such as Gnutella or BitTorrent and distributed them that way – that’d be another matter entirely, particularly if he did it while he was still at the library.

(Side note: I’m not a lawyer or a librarian, I’m just a guy who’s been keeping an eye on the whole copyright battle for several years and has done a lot of research and reading on the subject.)