Following a crusade on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America by News.com journalist Greg Sandoval, the Washington Post posted a correction to a column about a file sharing lawsuit which was misleading headlined "Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use."

Unfortunately, the correction is actually wrong:

A Dec. 30 Style & Arts column incorrectly said that the recording industry "maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer." [...]

In fact, the RIAA does not recognize that you have a legal right under the Fair Use doctrine to rip your CDs into MP3s to listen to them on your computer or digital audio player.

When asked point blank today if the RIAA believes it is legal to make MP3s, spokeswoman Liz Kennedy refused to answer the question and instead sent this boilerplate text from the RIAA's anti-piracy website:

[T]here's no legal "right" to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won't usually raise concerns so long as: The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own The copy is just for your personal use.

The RIAA has not and will not say that ripping MP3s for personal use from a lawfully purchased CD is legal, despite Sandoval's lobbying for the group.

UPDATE: Sandoval disagrees strongly with Threat Level.

We're going to have to disagree. I don't want to get into a blow-by-blow with you, but the Post story was wrong. I was hardly the only reporter to write that.

As we've noted here at Threat Level, the RIAA's court statements and along with statements on its own web site make it clear, the trade organization does not believe that individuals have the legal right to make digital audio files for their own use from copyrighted media they legally purchased.

And as David Kravets pointed out here, the RIAA's lawyer used that argument – that individuals don't even have the right to make MP3s - to persuade a jury to levy exorbitant fines on file sharer Jammie Thomas. The judge told the jury to consider that simply offering files for download constituted copyright infringement – the RIAA didn't have to prove anyone actually downloaded the files.

But it wasn't clear until after the testimony whether the judge would require proof that someone actually downloaded the songs she made available on Kazaa. So the RIAA''s lawyer engaged in a scorched earth campaign, argumentatively asking Thomas if she had gotten permission to simply rip the songs.

Before knowing whether the judge would enforce a burden of proof the

RIAA couldn't meet – they had no proof anyone actually downloaded songs from Thomas, the RIAA's lawyer was building a case to have Thomas found liable for simply ripping songs without permission. That's why the Sony executive said ripping a song was the same as stealing one, though now the RIAA finds it convenient to say she didn't understand the question.

Sandoval, whose reporting I usually respect, should be embarrassed for carrying the water (1, 2, 3) for the organization that crippled Digital Audio Tape recorders and tried to sue digital audio players out of existence. In the latter case, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that a MP3 player that moved music from a hard drive to the player was space-shifting - a "paradigmnatic non-commercial personal use entirely consistent with the the purposes of the [Audio Home Recording] Act."

The problem with Marc Fisher's column was that it unfortunately left the impression that the RIAA was suing a guy in Arizona for ripping

MP3s of music he bought, when the suit is actually about him distributing the MP3s. But the filing at issue in the suit was characterized fairly and accurately by Fisher.

Any correction to it should have simply noted that while the RIAA

does believe that it is illegal for Americans to make digital music files from legally purchased CDs, they have not sued anyone for doing so in absence of a belief that person shared such files on the internet.

So, to sum up, the RIAA does believe that a majority of American music buyers are thieving criminals, but it's not going to sue anyone over ripping MP3s because) a) it's not really a big deal to them anymore b) there's no real way to find out and/or c) it would be terrible publicity to sue someone for using an iPod.

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Photo: Eliot Phillips