Copies of software and audio files for private purposes are legal in Germany, too. You are just not allowed to sell them or make them available to foreigners. Sharing with friends for private purposes is ok, though.

WAIT. We have to differentiate this a little:

1. It is legal to copy audio for private purpose. The media you copy from must be either your property or being lent to you. You can only copy for your purpose, you are not allowed to make copies you intend to give away as a present or that you intend to sell. There are two szenarios that effectively do the same, but one is legal while the other is illegal: You own a CD, make a copy of it and give that copy to a friend as a gift. This is illegal. Now, you lend that CD to your friend, give him an empty CD-R as a gift, he gives you the CD and the CD-R and asks you to copy it for him (note, he doesn't give the CD back to you, he only gives it to you for the sole purpose if making a copy). I don't know the english words for it, but the difference is that while the CD always is (and well be) your property ("Eigentum",i.e. you own it), he still has it ("Besitz", it is part of his possesion) in legal terms. After you made the copy, you give the CD and the (now written to) CD-R to him. He can now give the CD back to you (and thereby end the loan of it). This procedure is legal (though effectively doing the same thing as the easier procedure of just copying the CD and giving it away). Weird, isn't it?


2. Software is a whole different thing. It is legal to make backups (no matter what the product license says), that is you may make any number of copies of a software you own, but you are still limited to use only as many copies of it (at the same time) as you have licenses to do so (you are not limited in the nummber of private audio copies or the use of these). You are never allowed to make a copy of a software you don't own (such as your friend's MS Office), and of course you are not allowed to use one of his backups. The copyright holder of the software may make excempts, as it is done with GPL and other public domain software, or even limited excempts, such as done for shareware. Oh, no law exists that limits your choice of backup media, so you might even be safe if you put your backups on the internet, as long as you make certain that those backups are not used by anyone else.

Just to confuse you all some more.

cu,
sven

proud MkII owner (12GB blue/green/smoked, #080000113)