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Comment by ryanschaefer | Hacker News Reader

If it doesn’t record anything how does it make a transcript? I think some of these laws are strict enough such that no audio recording, even if it’s immediately discarded, is legal.

But of course, I am not a lawyer.

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An audio "recording" is data (digital, analog, grooves on vinyl, whatever) that allows later listening to the original audio.

What Apple is doing in Rewind is as legal as if you were to take a contemporary transcript of a conversation. That's not illegal.

It's legal even if you're a skilled shorthand transcriber and get every word. That's Rewind, if I've understood it correctly.

People generally don't think of keeping bits in memory for some short period of time as "recording".

Doesn't stop it being...recording, though.

There are similar exceptions. For instance, the copy of licensed content that your computer makes in RAM in order to play it is explicitly exempt from being treated as a copyright violation.

isnt that how the modern telephone system works? digitize your voice, encode, transmit, decode, convert to analog audio. with buffering or keeping bits in memory all along the way?

is a telephone call a recording?

and taken to it's extreme.... isn't the atmosphere secretly taking the vibrations in the air right outside out mouth and propagating them through a physical medium, making them available to anyone to capture?

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