What a person does in their own home for entertainment is not subject to copyright restriction. Thus if you want to sing in the shower a top forty hit, this is not an infringement. To record airplay from the radio, or TV soaps is no problem. Put all the best songs from different records that actually belong to a former friend onto one long cassette tape to play endlessly in your car is just peachy keen. The copyright police will not be putting up roadblocks for traffic checks any time soon.

While institutional and commercial users are not so blessed, they are authorized to make certain copies under a "protect and use" policy. As long as only one copy is made, and not both the back-up and original media are for use simultaneously, this is acceptable. One (original) is protected in the vault, the other (copy) is for everyday use. Should that one copy get damaged, worn, stolen, it can be replaced by making another copy. Or alternatively, should the vault be destroyed by say an Act of God, the original media can be functionally replaced by the archival copy. The limitation is: don't sell off the original and continue to use a copy, or make multiple copies for distribution, even "in-house" distribution.

FCC licensed radio and television stations have an even broader exemption called the effemeral license. They can record either source material or complete programs for use on their own media. Commercials are often submitted to stations on bulky open reel formats, video or audio, but the stations may use cartridge systems for actual on-air play. Thus they dub the advertisers original media, making a copy more suited to broadcast needs. This right to record and hold extends for three years and is not required to be backed by any original media, in fact it could be from a live performance or a satellite feed. Once broadcast as a program, the status of the actual recording can be repurposed for archival use and be thus kept indefinitely.

Archival or effemeral rights is only the permission to hold or make copies of otherwise protected media. Possession of media does not confer any rights as to any particular use, especially with respect to commercial profit. Public domain material is rights free and can be adapted or put to any use, but finding the actual media is a problem because of the way recording companies do business. R-VCR can bridge the gap by providing usable media from either our library of high quality source recordings or yours. Yes even if you already own a collection of useful-for-production recordings, having them transfered to music CD-R will protect those originals and provide a product more suited for practical use. This is especially true if you are using a PC digital audio workstation with CDrom player.

The process we use is direct recording, employing no computers or other time wasting cumbersome processes. Analog sources are digitized in real time directly at the CD sampling rate. The equipment is completely portable requiring only a cable connection to your player. Music CD-R is the ideal archival copy media if for no other reason than we can confidently expect equipment capable of playing music CDs to be generally available for a long time. And it is optical, not magnetic, giving it excellent durability, and it cannot ever be accidentally recorded over, edited or changed.

We have a terrific pricing guide for music CD-R, HiFi videotape and other formats.