The RIAA is at it again...

the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

You can find the full story here.

I think this clearly falls under fair use, although I am not familiar with the particular legal rights associated with legally purchased music cds.

In any case, I don't feel bad for an industry that routinely takes advantage of young musicians and pays them pennies for their work. I also don't feel any obligation to purchase music in the form of a windows media file. Just who knows how long Windows is going to support that particular file format? No one knows. If Microsoft decides to quit supporting that file format, you will need to repurchase ALL your music saved in that particular format. The recording industry of course WANTS you to do this and they definitely don't want you to purchase a cd and then rip it to your computer. When you do it this way, you always have a hard copy of the music and you can save it in any format you want.

This industry treats us all like criminals and I am sick of it. They fixed prices for years, refused to sell songs on the internet, so people started trading them (illegally), and when they finally caved to selling music online, they only wanted to sell it in protected formats, so that you would need to buy music multiple times to play it on different devices. How is it possible to buy a DVD for less than $10, but new CDs routinely cost close to $20? I won't get in to all the details, but suffice it to say that the RIAA paid out a big settlement to consumers for fixing prices. Now, when we legally buy cds and copy them to our computer, we are the criminals?