A nagging question about MP3s and married couples

While starting the pretty awful task of packing our house for the move to Portland, I noticed that my wife and I had two copies of two CDs.  Which was kind of weird, because we have somewhat similar tastes in music -- a lot of overlap in 80s and 90s pop/rock.  I would've expected more duplicates, but the Post Office lost most of my CDs in 1996 when I moved out to Oklahoma City for my second clerkship.

Anyway, I set aside the two duplicates for consignment (more likely, donation, though).  That got me wondering about what the RIAA thinks that married couples who both have MP3 players should do when both want to install a song that they bought once, whether a physical CD or a MP3 file.  Just to be clear: this is merely a hypothetical within our family, since I am the only one with a portable MP3 player.

In other words, let's assume that I buy into the RIAA's normative position that one "ought" not to steal artists' intellectual property by violating the copyright on songs.  Some easy examples would be -- (1) it's clearly okay for me to install an MP3 that I paid for myself; and (2) it's clearly not okay for me to sell MP3 files ripped from a CD that I bought.  A harder example is -- (3) it's probably not okay for me to let my good friend borrow my CD to rip the MP3 file for his/her own MP3 player.

But where do married couples fit within this?  Example (3) falls out the way it does because if my friend likes the particular song enough to install it on his/her MP3 player, he/she should just go buy it.  Helping my friend save $0.99 is really just stealing $0.99 from the record label and the artist.  I find that argument persuasive as far it goes, but there's a significant difference between a good friend and a spouse, no?  I find it a little hard to believe that if my wife and I both wanted to put a song on MP3 players, we're supposed to buy two copies of the song. . . .

Comments

[Rohan]

Well, suppose it was 2 Walkmans or portable CD players?

Wouldn't you need to have two copies of the CD in order for the song to play on both machines at the same time? You could pass the CD around, but only one of you could play it at any given moment in time.

That can be seen as the standard. One paid copy per machine per unit time.

Of course, it is different in practice because the MP3 player contains the whole of your music collection, not discrete segments which can be passed around. I suspect that you and your wife feel that you "collectively" own your music collection, and that doesn't work when it is easier to duplicate the entire collection rather than pass around segments.

[Tung Yin]

That's a pretty good analogy, but of course, we would never buy two copies of the physical CD. Obviously, we would just take turns if we both had Walkmans. "Taking turns" doesn't have the same meaning with MP3s -- I mean, I guess we could take turns installing and then uninstalling the MP3 file so that only one of us would actually be playing it at any one time, but that seems ridiculously complicated. It just doesn't seem like there's a "lost sale" if a married couple were to make two MP3 files.

[L]

The RIAA will take as much as the courts give them. If were up to them, they'd probably tell you that you have a personal license to the music, and if you aren't wearing headphones, you'd have to make a separate payment for each person listening.