Can I take other people's record albums and burn a CD for them for a price?

Question

I have a turntable with a USB cable and wanted to advertise that I could take people's albums and "dub" them for them.

I mean legally with the piracy issue out there. I suppose as long as I don't keep the music on my computer it would be ok, right?

Answer 1

This is America, charge what you can get for your services.

That's like me asking if I can charge people to wash their cars.
of course! Silly.

Answer 2

Legally, I, as the owner of my various music CDs and cassettes, can make copies of them all for personal use.

Now, for what you want to do, it's a bit of a grey area. If you're just making copies of legal original vinyl and not keeping any tracks for yourself, it sounds like you'd fall into the legal side of things, like if you were a Kinko's for music. However, the fact that you would be making the copies, but you do not legally own the original source, and you intend to distrubute a copy of said music (regardless of whether you actually own it or not), and charge money to do so, could be just enough technicalities to make this illegal where the original owner could do it using your equipment without any issues.

Unfortunately, I can't give you a firm and knowledgeable answer, but this sounds like something that you might want to ask the RIAA about.

Answer 3

Its illegal. Your making money off of using copy protected music. However, its not like the music and movie industry has police going house to house to check for illegal content, just be aware that advertising carries risk.