According to Russel Shaw (and countless others), ripping CD’s is not the actual crime; storing the ripped tracks in shared folders on your hard drive is the offense. When I originally read that the RIAA opposed ripping CD’s to your hard drive, I, like every other person in the blogosophere, was in awe. This, however, makes sense. Shaw writes:
To put it more directly, storing your ripped MP3’s in, say, your “My Music” folder would be OK. But installing Kazaa, eDonkey, one of the torrents, or another P2P utility that can fish these files out and set them up for swapping is a bad bad thing.
So to stay out of harm’s way, don’t make infringing files “available.” Don’t install file-sharing software that can be triggered to exchange any infringing music files you have on your hard drive. If you have such software, delete it. And if you must continue to keep this software for whatever reason, disable its file-swapping capabilities. #
Better?