All format shifting does is, as long as you can prove you - at some point - purchased a legitimate license for private viewing of a work - allows you to migrate that license through whatever legal devices you may have access to. Let’s say your have a music CD you ripped to iTunes - the same as now the right to listen to that music on iTunes is dependant on being able to prove you legally purchased that music. If your original CD gets stolen, then you no longer can prove your claim. If your original CD is obsolete however because they stop making CD players - you still have the right to port your license forwards.

In practice this doesn’t really do anything to limit a creators right to create and sell multiple versions of their works. Convenience (and increase in features and quality) will always make modern formats more appealing than ported ones (you *could* use your Bu-ray player to just watch DVD’s, or only watch DVD’s encoded from VHS tapes, or only watch VHS tapes transfered from super8 - but why would you). On the otherside of the chain iTunes television shows are cheap, plentiful, optimized for iPods and iPhones and can be downloaded directly from the iTunes store… but that shouldn’t mean that people who shelled out for full box sets shouldn’t have the option to rip their DVD’s if they so wish.

The important thing though is that the *license* granted doesn’t change. Format shifting doesn’t grant the user any additional useage rights (even under the existing law you can’t play both an original and a backup at the same time… nor can you watch a DVD and an iPhone rip of a movie simultaneously) but what it does do is clarify why there is an incentive to buy *anything* when format lifespans are exponentially decreasing.

As Scott points out you can’t “create” resolution (or fidelity). So it’s not like if I upsample my 1996 “Dark City” DVD onto a BD-R it’s going to be any kind of a substitute for a Blu-Ray. It’s going to look like my old (badly mastered) DVD. But I should have that right - the same as should I choose to watch that DVD by recording it to my laptop hard-drive (to save battery power on airplane flights), or PSP, or iPhone.

This really isn’t the barrier to monetization that people think it is. I have the ability to encode my DVD’s to my iPhone in about three mouse clicks and a hour of processor time - and I still rent movies (movies I *own*) over iTunes. Nine times out of ten the couple of bucks is worth the convenience hands down, or I’m on the road and need to look something up.

If your original media is destroyed (or your original digital media deleted) then you don’t have rights in anything to transfer now do you? So the point is moot.

As for the “remastered CD rip” instead of a cassette tape: That’s like downloading a Blu-ray rip because you bought the DVD. It just doesn’t make sense and is a horrible example. There’s a significant difference because it’s not simply format shifting. Format shifting doesn’t (ever, in my experience) enhance the quality to a level higher than the original.

What happens if the original media is destroyed, stolen, or I lose it? What happens if my backups are destroyed? Can I download it from the Internet? What if all I can find on the Internet is a remastered version (ripped from CD) of the cassette tape that I purchased initially?