I think Universal Records is jacking with me...

[the stranger]

I picked up a disco compilation (released in 2003) and if I extract audio off that CD, it ends up with clicks in the audio.

Here's an artcile that I found....

 

This excerpt is pretty clear about the ruling regarding space shifting of content....

 

"Taken to Court

The first case against the new technologies had nothing to do with computers. In 1976 Universal Studios and Disney sued Sony for copyright infringement and asked the court to stop Sony from selling the Betamax, the first VCR, claiming it enabled unauthorized copying of television shows and movies that would cause irreparable harm to the industry.

As the case moved through the judicial system on its way to a 1984 Supreme Court decision, MPAA President Jack Valenti made a Cassandra-like prediction to Congress in 1982: I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.

Despite the dire picture painted by Hollywood, the high court ruled 54 in Sonys favor, saying that most people used their VCRs for time shiftingtaping a show to watch it laterwhich the Court ruled was a fair use. As long as the Betamax was capable of such a significant noninfringing use, Sony could not be liable for contributory infringement.

Fifteen years later the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals invoked the Betamax doctrine when it added space shifting to time shifting in the list of noninfringing uses. The case was markedly similar, with the RIAA trying to block Diamond Multi-medias Rio, the first MP3 player. The term MP3, which has come to mean any song stored on a computer, refers to the standard for compressing digital music files, or making them smaller on your computers hard drive to fit more songs than could be fit using the uncompressed CD format. The Rio was the first hand-held device that allowed songs taken from a CD and saved as MP3srippedto be taken with you, the same way the Sony Walkman allowed music cassettes to be portable.

In the unanimous 1999 ruling, the Ninth Circuit said that despite the RIAAs fear of piracy, most people used the MP3 player to space-shift musiccopy legally owned music to the new devicewhich the court held to be a fair use act. Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act, the court wrote."

 

http://www.dcbar.org/for_lawyers/washington_lawyer/february_2003/access.cfm

 

The rest of the article is very good and gives a good overview of the whole story involving the limits of fair use.

And an interesting note in the article is that Mickey Mouse was about to become public domain when Congress extended copyright terms....

 

"Last October the Supreme Court heard Eldred v. Ashcroft, which challenged the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the copyright term by 20 years to life plus 70 years. Critics say Congress passed the extension as a gift to big-donor Disney, to keep Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain, and that extending copyright does nothing to promote new works but threatens to create a perpetual term."