Also in Australia, and its not that black-and-white in my understanding:
This is known as "Format Shifting" — taking one copyrighted medium and converting it to another. In Australia, you are explicitly not allowed to do this with CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays.
You are only allowed to keep a digital copy if you continue to retain the original — a backup. If the original is lost or destroyed, your digital copies must be discarded.
For example, you can rip a CD and put it on your iPod, or computer, as long as you continue to own the CD. The issue here is that in both cases you also control the device you are copying it to. You don't control but rather lease space on Amazon's servers — so it introduces a grey area on whether you are allowed to backup to such places and whether putting data on those servers constitutes distribution of the copyright material.
Realistically, none of this is black-and-white and Amazon could flag it as infringing content and remove it just to cover themselves against DMCA complaints anyway. This is true in both Australia and the US, regardless of the differences in copyright law (Australian copyright law offers far fewer protections than the US, incidentally) because both having similar DMCA laws.
This is known as "Format Shifting" — taking one copyrighted medium and converting it to another. In Australia, you are explicitly not allowed to do this with CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays.
You are only allowed to keep a digital copy if you continue to retain the original — a backup. If the original is lost or destroyed, your digital copies must be discarded.
For example, you can rip a CD and put it on your iPod, or computer, as long as you continue to own the CD. The issue here is that in both cases you also control the device you are copying it to. You don't control but rather lease space on Amazon's servers — so it introduces a grey area on whether you are allowed to backup to such places and whether putting data on those servers constitutes distribution of the copyright material.
Realistically, none of this is black-and-white and Amazon could flag it as infringing content and remove it just to cover themselves against DMCA complaints anyway. This is true in both Australia and the US, regardless of the differences in copyright law (Australian copyright law offers far fewer protections than the US, incidentally) because both having similar DMCA laws.