What are the laws on copying copyrighted material for personal use?

For media you can make a copy for yourself in a different format aslong as you own the original and copyed version.

Here in Canada that is not the case, there is no law explicitly granting consumers the ability to media-shift things they own, let alone circumvent any protection put on by companies preventing you from doing this. There are a few small mentions in our laws about doing so for musical sound recordings for private use.

Sadly our Conservative government has allegiances to the American copyright industries and the RIAA so they love bending over and trying to ram us with these awful draconian laws that don’t permit format shifting etc. Then again, the Liberals lie and try to ram us too with Bill C-60.

Of course you should be able to media shift the things you own for your own personal use! It is stupid to expect me to repurchase media for each new media player that comes out, especially when so many media versions are discontinued when they become a burden to the companies or when allegiances are made, etc. They can play that game, I’m not playing it.

When I buy a media item, I buy it because I intend to consume it, how I choose to do so should not matter one bit to them nor should they have any say or influence (which they don’t). Conditional licenses, psh. That’s like Kenny G charging you more money to have sex with his music in the background than to have it playing while cleaning the house.

All the media companies love to bitch about how their industry is dying. Good for them. I still get my tunes, I still go and see local bands and buy local band CDs that don’t have any copyright to bother with. That makes it easier to share their tunes with my friends, who then go to their shows and buy music. You see, it’s just the middlemen who are bitching about the lost revenue here, the creators rarely get more money from different versions, too many greedy people have their hand in the pot. If you gave an artist $20 in their hand they’d make more money than if you bought their iTunes single.

Did you not read the FBI piracy warning at the beginning of the movie? it states that it is illegal to copy the thing whether for monitary gain or not.

You would be wrong, but you have a lot of company in your mistaken belief.

British Copyright Law according to the wiki:

“British Copyright law has been criticised as needlessly strict and out of date. Consumer advocacy groups commented that it was the least consumer-friendly of 16 countries whose laws they examined, due principally to the lack of a “fair use” exception.[43] Exceptions to British law are strictly defined, although there is a right to create backup copies of software, so that the original can be kept safe from damage.

A survey carried out in 2006 for the National Consumer Council indicated that over half of British adults infringe copyright law by copying and ripping music CDs, with 59% stating a belief that copying for personal use is legal.[44] However, ripping music from CDs to another format, such as MP3, is currently illegal. In 2006 The Institute for Public Policy Research called for a “public right to copy”.[45] In January 2008 the government proposed changes to copyright law that would legalise copying for personal use.[46]”

@Marina well funk me, I guess everyone in the UK with an iPod should be arrested (unless of course everything on it was bought from the iTunes store)

No matter the letter of the law (which has been spelled out pretty well in the posts above me), no sane company would go after someone for ripping a CD that they paid for. I mean, look at the crap Capital Records and Coldplay got when they tried to pull that kind of thing off.

Things were easier when all you had was records. But different formats are different products, and the laws haven’t really evolved with the technology.