Internet Cafe Fined for Letting Users Burn Downloaded Music

prostoalex writes: "EasyInternetCafe, an international operation with cafes in major Western European cities, is fighting the attempts of British Phonographic Industry to fine it for letting customers burn the downloaded music to CD's. It managed to lower the original fine of 1M British pounds to GBP 100,000 so far."

Comments

Where's the Crime?

[renehollan]

Unless the copyright holder hasn't given permission, this is perfecty legal. Thre is plenty of copyright music on the internet that is free to download and copy.

Oh, I see, this is one of those, "punish the tool maker because the tool can be used to comit a crime".... On that note, I demand that the courts have everyone else executed because they might otherwise murder me -- people can do that, ya know.

In a similar vein, I noticed my local Target store offering a service to copy video tapes to DVD. Since I have a lot of VHS tapes taking up a bunch of space, this would be a great thing for me were it not for the fact that they charge some US$35/tape for the service. But, what burned me was their note that "copying copyright material" is illegal. Ever hear of "fair use" dweebs? Even the DMCA doesn't apply here since there is no access protection on a videocassette (macrovision is part of the VCR).

i misread it ...

[morcheeba]

I thought this was related to internet cafe fined for letting users burn but thankfully not.