You broke the law.

It will soon be illegal to rip your CD's on to your hard drive to put onto your iPod. Well, it will be that way if the RIAA has their way. I have ranted and bitched about them before, and I am not about to stop. If you know me, you have most likely heard me bitching about this new issue that has arisen. As we all know, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding copyrighted music ever since Napster first appeared and brought P2P widespread. Since then the RIAA has gained a lot of power and started enforcing laws against piracy. One thing that has always protected the user is what is called Fair Use. Fair use is the way that you can use copyrighted material legally. Included in this is creating backups for your CDs onto a hard drive or onto a CD-R/RW. The RIAA has now decided that this should no longer be considered fair use and that consumers that have legally purchased CDs should not be allowed to create backups onto their hard drives or on blank CDs. This also means that you would not be able to put music onto and iPod or other Mp3 player because that would no longer be considered fair use. Now you may be asking yourself how the record company can justify this. I mean, if I purchase a CD I will want to have a back up incase my dog suddenly decides that CDs taste as good as his dog bones, or even if any other terrible thing may happen to my disc. The RIAA believes that CDs are so inexpensive that if you disc gets damaged you can go out and purchase the CD again and that there is no need to back up your music. I don't know about you, but $15 isn't exactly what I call inexpensive. Especially compared to the outstanding cost of $0 that it costs to backup your music. I will agree with the RIAA that piracy is bad and that copyrighted material should be protected but they should not try to rip off the consumers that support purchasing of legal music. I guarantee that if they pass this law we will see a significant rise in illegal downloads. This is just asking for people to steal music. The RIAA is basically saying that we should come support them and buy the CDs that they sell, but the second you need help because you scratched your CD then you are on your own. They do not wanna hear anything from you unless you are coughing up cash for a new copy of that CD. This is ridiculous and should not be allowed. It is because of moves like this that the public tends to despise the RIAA. This just shows what can happen when someone gets obsessed with the little power they are given.