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The original was posted on /r/piracy by /u/OlsroFR on 2024-08-04 20:24:38+00:00.

Hey mateys !

I’ve learnt something recently that you might find interesting especially if you live (or come for a trip) in France. This also applies to books, CD videogames and DVD/blu-ray movies.

To be clear and simple, in France you can come in any public library (and many of them have hundreds or thousands of music CD) with your laptop, your external hard drives and your own CD drive(s) to rip music for free and unlimited as long as it is for private usage.

As long as you do it inside the library (because to be legal, you need to rip for private usage something that you can access legally and CDs in public librairies are legal as long as you do not borrow them and borrowing them by itself is still a gray area here even if librairies do not care and just offer the service anyway since years).

Don’t forget to support artists directly if you really like some songs because music is not free to produce. But if you are poor or if you want to quickly startup a big collection of perfect quality 44.1KHz/16 bits FLACS while staying 100% legal (or if you just like free music because it’s cool), here we have this other option rather than just sailing the seas.

It might also be a good option about CDs that are not sold new anyway since years, and buying them second hand does not support the artist anyway so ripping them in the library makes sense and looks very ethical in this case (and it is 100% legal haha). It can also be a way to find CDs that are not archived anywhere else in the internet.

What I find kinda funny is that this practice really smells like piracy, by duplicating tons of content for free from a single centralized place. But it’s really legal and real libraries all around the country are organizing sometimes “copy-parties” events to incite people to come with their scanners and CD drives to make private copies of everything (books, CDs, DVDs, blu-rays, CD videogames etc) from the library. Bypassing strong DRMs (on blu-rays/CD videogames) to make a private copy seems also to be legal and tolerated : .

Hope you’ve learnt something. I don’t know if some other countries have similar laws that allow things like this. Feel free to make your own researches :)