RIAA's Shocking Claim: It's Illegal To Turn CDs into MP3s (Updated)

In the supplemental brief filed in an Arizona court in the case of Atlantic v. Howell, lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) apparently made a stunning new claim: that consumers who copy CDs onto their computers are committing copyright infringement.

It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies of Plaintiff's copyrighted sound recordings on his computer... Virtually all of the sound recordings on Exhibit B are in the ".mp3" format. Defendant admitted that he converted these sound recordings from theiroriginal format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife's use... Once Defendant converted Plaintiff's recordings into the compressed ".mp3" format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs.

While it's true that a copyright holder holds the exclusive right tomake a copy of a work (thus the term "copyright"), it's also true thatconsumers have an affirmative defense in the Fair Use principle,
which allows copies to be made for certain protected reasons.

Inaddition, the Sony v. Betamax precedent gives consumers the right to space-shift content into other formats, such as recording a Beta signal onto a VHS tape, or taking a CD and turning it into an MP3.

Not only does the RIAA's claim that turning CDs into MP3sconstitutes infringement appear to be false, but, as Ray Beckerman of Recording Industrythe People pointed out, it directly contradicts what they saidduring MGM v. Grokster, which was heard by the Supreme Court in 2005:

Therecord companies have said... that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD
that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto youriPod.

Update: A lot of people have pointed out something that I'd noticed when I wrote about this, and wish I had posted initially. The RIAA's brief argues that users are not authorized to copy a song from a CD into their shared folder. It does not appear to clarify whether the ripping or sharing aspect of this process is unauthorized, but most likely, their lawyer was referring to latter.

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(PDF on irlweb; via recordingindustryvsthepeople; image from ibiblio)