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CD Ripper 'Incites Law Breaking,' Says British Regulator
Barence writes "A British firm has been banned from advertising a CD ripping device because it 'incites law breaking.' The Brennan JB7 is 'a CD player with a hard disk that stores up to 5,000 CDs.' The adverts for the Brennan highlight the convenience of ripping your entire CD collection to the device – much like we've all been doing for years on our PCs, iPods and other MP3 players. The Advertising Standards Authority has banned the ads after concluding 'that the ad misleadingly implied it was acceptable to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes without the permission of the copyright owner.'"
Silly Advertising Standards Authority, april fools' day was yesterday!
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
Format shifting is illegal in the UK. Fixing this, and adding explicit fair use provisions, are both things that David Cameron has proposed. Whether they'll actually be done is another matter. It's quite ludicrous that, as it stands, we have a law that pretty much everyone in the UK has violated.
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We have no 'fair use' laws in the UK.
That's fair use AFAIK. Anyway, that's what users have been doing for decades now.
I guess there is no fair use right in Britain? It's perfectly legal to copy CDs, vinyl, and cassettes that you own for your personal use. I can't imagine it being different in the UK.
Cars incite law breaking by being able to go faster than the speed limit. Therefore cars must be banned from being advertised as fast or sporty.
After all, you can post or download child porn or worse, I'm sure to the various copyright interested organizations, use them to download any of a multitude of apps to copy music.
implied it was acceptable to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes without the permission of the copyright owner
That's because it is. Personal copies are very acceptable.
Wait wait, "format shifting" is illegal in the UK? That's messed up.
Do they ban USB turntables there? The reason to get one is to convert your LP's into MP3's for your portable player. How is this any different?
Converting from CD implies the existence of the physical CD. Copying from P-P can be many generations of copies from the original.
The truth shall set you free!
Or is it a blanket ban on all cd rippers? Doesn't sound that way.
Strange, I remember those Apple ads that said "Rip. Mix. Burn."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo
Shown on UK TV. The ASA said nothing.
If this Brennan JB7 device is illegal, so is iTunes. Is the ASA now banning any adverts from Apple that mention the software?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
more than 7 years ago I purchased a Hercules 80Gb mp3(256Kbit recording) device. It has Line-in recording (for turn tables), A CD drive so you
can play and rip CD's. It also has USB so that you can copy the files to another device.
I got it from Richter Sounds in Reading at one of their open box sales. Great device.
The device that has been banned is really nowt new at all. I suppose my bit of kit is illegal too..?
The ban is all down to the Music industry seeing their grim reaper on the horizon. /. reader has a CD of the Beaver & Krause Album 'All Good Men' then I'd be interested in purchasing it. The Cat peed over my 12in Album and side 2 is ruined.
FWIW, I've been buying lots of 12in disks the past few years and digitising them. Listening to some classic 60's albums has reawakend my interest in Music but in the main there is hardly anything coming onto the market now as a New Release (As opposed to a re-issue) that interests me then I'll stick to 50's->70's Rock, Blues & Jazz thank you very much.
If any
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
And the public pays and pays and pays. Here again we have people who feel that the internet only exists for them to earn a living and that all laws must support their nonsense ideas. Electronic information storage and processing has nothing to do with enabling or preserving anyone's ability to make a living. The entire concept of the net is the free flow of all information that is to beyond all private and governmental regulations.. It is simple - From Every Mountain Top Let Freedom Ring. And you may not patent the ring tone of the bell.
My car can rip CDs to the internal hard drive too. Should we also ban the production and sale of all BMW cars equipped with iDrive?
and they want their spurious argument back.
Not really. Helps nail someone who you can't get for any other crime.
If this is really the point of it then it is still a bad law. You should make breathing illegal and then you can arrest anyone you want. This of course undermines the entire point of having laws and leads back to the feudal system where you just do what the guy with the biggest pointy stick wants. It might be frustrating to not be able to get someone who is committing real crimes but the solution is not to undermine the entire system by making everyone criminals.
The UK doesn't have the US's fair use rules, so technically ripping your CDs is illegal, although its never enforced (at least not against individuals) .
Record shops were always happy to sell blank cassettes, CD-Rs and MiniDiscs - you just don't shatter the illusion that an awful lot of customers are amateur musicians taping their own work by going up to the assistant and saying "Dear assistant, can you recommend a blank CD onto which I can copy this here album which I am about to purchase?"
Basically, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell".
In this case, some public-spirited person has submitted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about this particular ad, so there's not much the ASA can do but say, yeah, the ad incites copyright violation.
Note that its the specific ad that's been banned - not the product. The ASA is an independent industry regulator, not a court of law - nobody has been prosecuted. The manufacturer will just have to stick in some small print.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The product hasn't been banned. The wording of an advertisement has. The ASA ruling specifically addressed your point, however concluded that "the overall impression of the ad was such that it encouraged consumers and businesses to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes" (my emphasis).
Computers aren't advertised to do the things you mention.
Frankly I suspect the ASA wouldn't give a damn except that there was a complaint which was technically correct by their own rules.
It does not take a lot of thinking and researching what competitors do to find that the only thing these guys need to do is add a sticker to every box stating that copying copyrighted material without permission is illegal and therefore this device is for copying other kinds of CDs. Life will then carry on as normal. Apple does the same in the UK and other places and the difference is all in the fine print.
"Rip. Mix. Burn." Don't you watch TV? That was an Apple ad.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Look there was never much of a fuss when people did things like copying their records to cassette tapes so they could listen in the car. The real fight started when people started sharing those recordings with their 10,000 closest friends. Before the rampant sharing they had little affect on sales. I've heard lots of people claim sharing promotes sales but that isn't reflected in the plummeting sales numbers. If this was really about copying CDs for personal use I doubt there would be much of a fight going on. I'm old enough to clearly remember 8 tracks as a teenager. Back in the 8-track and cassette days I don't remember ever hearing about a fight over some one recording from one device to another one. This battle started over what happened after the songs were ripped not really the ripping itself. The internet is what changed how people used the ripped material.
Just like high powered cars incite breaking speed limit laws and spray paint incite drawing graffiti on other people's walls.
The product hasn't been banned. The wording of an advertisement has. The ASA ruling specifically addressed your point, however concluded that "the overall impression of the ad was such that it encouraged consumers and businesses to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes" (my emphasis).
Computers aren't advertised to do the things you mention.
"Rip. Mix. Burn. " ???
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Think I'll buy one!
ps - my capatcha was "urinated". Pretty appropriate for the circumstances..... :-)
Forcing consumers and media device manufacturers to rely on subjective judgments of what qualifies as fair use, and thus never having any certainty about whether even the simplest and most harmless of tasks are legal or not is ridiculous.
Copyright law grants creators of works several exclusive rights over their works including:
* Reproducing the work.
* Creating derivative works.
* Distributing the work (including giving it away, selling it, renting it, etc).
* Performing or displaying the work publicly.
These basic fundamentals of copyright law were written when copying was expensive and difficult, and performing personal backups, format-shifting, time-shifting, and incidental copies were unheard of. These days any use of digital media requires some copying just to use the media. If you think about it, if you are copying(ie reproducing) a work but not doing any of the other things, then it is by definition for personal use, and should be covered under fair use. We should clarify the law and just eliminate copying as one of the exclusive rights altogether.
Fair use would still be needed to determine things like how much of an article can you quote before it is too much. But those are inherently fuzzy issues, so having a fuzzy law to handle them isn't a bad thing. What a consumer can do with his goods should be cut and dry.
You might be pretty sure, but you're wrong. Ever hear of prepaid cards? You know, the things that credit card companies want you to give as gifts (so they get to hold the money and earn money off it out until it's spent), and that Young America, MN likes to send you when you complete a mail-in rebate these days? It's perfectly possible to buy MP3s using a completely untraceable prepaid card which appears to be a normal credit card to the MP3 retailer.
Get the police to raid the offices of the ASA AND the homes of everyone that works for them, just to check on the copyright status of the files on their iPods, mobile phones etc..
The ASA has been a quite useless regulator, picking on crap but letting big stuff slide.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
They haven't banned the product, just the advertising. Not to imply this is a good decision, by any means, but a decision by the ASA is very different to an outright product ban.
The media companies keep telling us that when we buy media, we're not really "buying" it, what we're really buying a license to read/listen/view to the media in question, with the cost for the physical support included in the price. In fact there's a cost of nearly zero in case of files sold via the internet. Fair enough.
But then if the physical support for the media gets damaged, why can't they offer a replacement at a lower cost? If my CD gets damaged, why do I need to buy another license? Shouldn't I be able to return to the store with the damaged CD and get a replacement at a much lower cost (near 1$) since the license is already paid for?
So if I buy a license to the media, why do they care if I convert it to another format for my personal use? The license is already paid for.
Can you / someone post the matching clause for the US that demonstrates that format shifting is legal here? I'd like to put that into my files.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Format shifting illegal? That would mean speakers are illegal, as they shift electric format to acoustic which people record in their brain (ear-to-brain would also be illegal as shifts format from acoustic to electric/biological BTW).
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Thirty years ago Bow Wow Wow charted a song called "C30 C60 C90 Go" which basically extolled the virtues of recording vinyl onto tape.
Selling kitchen knives incites stabbing.
"Format shifting" from bits to sound waves.... this is stupid. They format shifted from the CD to RADIO WAVES. And they say nothing. Show me the exception.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
It's only a matter of time before the Brits ban paper...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Though not set in stone, this is from the EFF website.
Although the legal basis is not completely settled, many lawyers believe that the following (and many other uses) are also fair uses:
Space-shifting or format-shifting - that is, taking content you own in one format and putting it into another format, for personal, non-commercial use. For instance, "ripping" an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.)
http://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo
Rip. Mix. Burn.
Can you / someone post the matching clause for the US
Title 17, United States Code, section 1008:
They used to be sold in placed we once called 'music stores'.
I don't think that's how it works. The laws generally state what is illegal, not what is legal.
I can sit in the sun on my back porch today and play the ukulele. Legally. There is no "clause" I can point to that says it's legal, but in the absence of something saying it's illegal, I can do it.
I'm not sure how it works where you live, but I can't imagine there's a country where everything that's legal has been codified.
But, the ASA isn't a statutory body and it actually has f--k all powers apart from passing the complaint on. It's basically just regulator by advertisers for advertisers, not much more than a jumped-up (and pretty worthless) trade association IMO.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
with an interesting CV (resume).
He worked at Sinclair research in the 80's and later on at Konix and then Atari where he had a hand indeveloping the Panther and the Jaguar:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Martin_Brennan_(engineer)
I had never heard of this device.
Now I want one.
Generally there isn't one.
There are some specific exceptions, but whether or not they apply depend on a number of details. (E.g. 17 USC 108, 117, 1001 et seq.) Odds are good that if you aren't already familiar with a particular exception that you fall under, nothing applies to you.
Fair use is an old standby, and it is true that any otherwise infringing activity could be a fair use, but remember that there is no guarantee that any particular activity actually will be a fair use. Fair use depends on the circumstances, and must be determined on a case-by-case basis and merely because something is fair for one person, that doesn't mean that it will be fair for another, even if all else is equal.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me that if we were to revisit several key fair use cases today, changed circumstances could render the outcomes quite different.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Can make their version of reality stick.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...at least as far as the JB7's adverts in Private Eye http://www.private-eye.co.uk/ are concerned. Brennan often take out one or two page spreads, along with at least two other services that offer to rip your CD's/tapes/vinyl/anything to MP3/FLAC/Vorbis/AAC for you.
As other posters have pointed out, format shifting is illegal in the UK, meaning approx 95% of our population have broken the law at some point in their lives - something that has no doubt cost the UK 279% of the GDP every year - but it's never really been brought up by the authorities for the simple reason that such a landmark case as questioning the lawlessness of format shifting is almost certain to have major repercussions in the law, namely the introduction of fair use provisions similar to the US. Almost everyone in the UK already *thinks* format shifting is fine and dandy (hey, iTunes makes it so easy!), and any major media attention brought to it will do nothing but weaken the case of the incumbent record labels.
Sadly, I doubt the Brennan company has the money or inclination to pursue such a case. Writing's on the wall though, I just expect it to be bundled along with "...but only if we can get 'copyright = life of every living descendant plus 200 years!". On the plus side, if Cliff Richard is busy posturing about how his songs from the 50's coming out of copyright will mean the end of all humanity, he won't have time to write any news ones (which, ironically, would actually result in the end of all humanity).
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
If I put a CD into my Mac, iTunes rips it for me but Macs are in almost every film... I think that Brennan JB7 did not pay the right person enough money :-)
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
The perfect example of why copyright is screwed up is that you need one license to download an MP3 file and and stick it on your cellphone and listen to it with the cellphone media player via the cellphone speakers.
Then you need a different license to take the same MP3 file on the same cellphone and play it via the same MP3 playing code in response to an incoming call.
Significant Non-Infringing Uses
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Seems simple enough to me. Why buy CDs if I can not put the music on my ipod? Just buy, and download, from Amazon, or Walmart, or whatever. You can plug your ipod into most car CD players, or home systems, or whatever.
I wonder if this sort of obvious political influence by the corporations, will make some people steal music just to send a FU to the greedy, corrupt, oppressive corporations, and their political lackeys?
The previous Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was also embarrassed over this issue. In an interview he claimed that he mostly listened to The Beatles on his iPod. At the time, there was no digital download available for any Beatles songs, and ripping songs from a CD is illegal under UK copyright law. When this was subsequently pointed out, there was a hurried statement that Brown had mis-spoke and listened to the Beatles on his CD player, not the iPod. Hilarious.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The ASA is an industry financed organisation which pretends to police the advertising industry in the hope that the government will not impose a true regulatory body with real legal powers and penalties.
The ASA only responds to complaints and then only highlights those which affect some other part of industry. It couldn't care less about Joe Public unless the case is so blatant that a response would be good PR for the ASA.
Look on their web site and try to locate their regulatory 'powers'. Those amount to the devastating, "...an advertiser's reputation can be badly damaged if it is seen to be flouting the rules designed to protect consumers." Ha Ha Ha
Most other measures they can take revolve around membership of the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) an industry body set up to protect the interests of the advertising industry - not the public.
IIRC Apple had already been trying to get the labels to agree to a music store in iTunes, and it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that this would eventually happen. It was just a matter of how long before the record labels finally realised their choice was "join them or die". Besides which, Apple are a big company who could happily have tied the labels up in court for years.
Brennan, OTOH, are a much smaller company who couldn't have kept a court case going for so long and would be vanishingly unlikely to set up a licensing deal for a music store. Their ads are clearly aimed at a generation that doesn't know about the iPod (and wouldn't be terribly interested in it if they did) but do have a significant music collection, much of which simply doesn't get listened to much.
'Cause now I'm interested.
Filed under: Streisand Effect
not that many people actually want it; fair use is really quite a bad idea
Can you please qualify that statement?
You can still use CD rippers in the UK if it is a personal recording. Why wouldn't you be able to turn a CD you personally made into MP3s? Now, a CD you don't hold the copyrights to, that's another story.
Twinstiq, game news
Great answer -
I'm on the verge of spending some $200 to buy my favorite songs on iTunes, and then the rest are project copies with changed pitch and tempos etc. None are really offered for sharing use. I am busy certifying my computers for compliance for the potential rough standard of 90% copyright compliance - songs, copies of articles are research only, etc.
I updated my glacially moving webpage to also be documented 100% compliant. A tip is the Prelinger Archives are a very low level source of many things, essentially public domain. So I am making backgrounds out of swatches of prelinger snapshots.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hi AC.
In this context I'd want the rule that says "all such non public / research copies are legal" etc.
I participate in no sharing services, but once I saw those new law drafts kicking around, I started taking steps to really tighten up. It's not 1999 anymore unfortunately.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Due to the uniquely stupid way the ASA works, they only operate on the basis of complaints about advertising. No competitor has whined to them yet about particular USB turntables, but clearly one has lodged one about the Brennan. Probably because they're sick and tired of the Bose-style saturation bombing of the Sunday supplements going on.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
so you cant have an xbox in the uk ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?