ELP Laser Turntable - Try Before You Buy

I dont think doing transfers is illegal. I do LP to CD transfers all of the time. It is one of my best selling services. People come to me with a collection of records that they want on CD, and I make them CD's, and they usually end up selling the vinyl.

 

If the person that bought the record is doing the transfer that falls under fair use but charging someone for that service is somewhat of a legal issue.

 

There are many transfer facilities out there, it must be legal. What if you have an analog multitrack tape, that you want to have transfered to digital, you go to a transfer facility, I have a hard time believing that that is illegal.

If it is indeed illegal, I will stop offering transfer services.

 

If it is, it shouldn't be, in my opinion. However, obviously if someone was selling a bunch of copies then it would be illegal. But if they only made one copy for the original user, I don't see how it could be considered crooked in any way.

 

If you have a multitrack then chances are you are the copyright holder. I make copies all the time but it's either for the record company, songwriter or publishing company. Once I wasn't even allowed to make a copy for the artist, but that was an extreme case.

If you are dealing with coprywritten material you or your client don't own and money is being exchanaged for copies being made there are some legal issues to address, not that anyone will ever come after you for it.

 

When I was a kid, I went to a mall here in central Florida and there was a store (or a booth?) where you could make an 8-track dub using THEIR gear and their tape. IIRC, you picked the album you wanted, bought the blank 8-track cart from them, they handed you the factory-made tape, the blank cart and then "allowed" you to use their equipment thereby simply "renting" you the use of their machinery. Of course, it was still patently illegal but this was probably 1970 or '71. Does anybody in here remember this scam (Bob L.?)? I had forgotten all about this scam until tonight so I might have some of the details wrong, but I remember that they sold you longer tapes if you wanted to put two albums on one tape.

 

Wow, that SMART devices announcement is quite a read. Above all, I wonder why isn't someone making something like this elsewhere by now... where's the competition? If the price would ever come down, there'd be more of a market, wouldn't there??

 

I didn't know that... why should it be illegal, given that the legal owner of the record would end up keeping the copy?

 

That's a problem - if they sell the vinyl. Now they have violated the spirit of fair use.

 

I have the same question? Why not? Mass production has lowered the price of computers dramatically.

Must admit I was not aware that this machine requires virginally clean records tho. That might affect my decision to buy even if it came down to $1,000.

 

Patents would be the most likely culprit. I would guess there's enough demand among audiophiles to support someone else doing this, but it's also possible that the turntable market is entirely DJ-supported at this point, and why would a DJ care about this technology?