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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
This question was answered in the 1980s with VCRs.
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People try to invoke Sony to justify all kinds of copyright violations. The Sony case was about
time-shifting, not format-shifting, and was decided on two merits: first, it involved material the viewer had been invited to freely view (which is why it's legal to record Transformers off CBS, but not the DVD you rented); and second, the 100% copying was in this case deemed fair-use because it made little sense to record only a portion of a broadcast.
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When one considers the nature of a televised copyrighted audiovisual work ... and that time-shifting merely enables a viewer to see such a work which he had been invited to witness in its entirety free of charge, the fact ... that the entire work is reproduced ... does not have its ordinary effect of militating against a finding of fair use. Wikipedia.
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Attempts to analogize format-shifting in the copying of copyright materials to the time-shifting authorized in Sony haven't faired so well in court. Cf.
A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc..
--Nathanael