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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.'"
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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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!
Not in the UK.
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.
Yes we do. It is called "fair dealing".
It is perfectly legal to make a copy if you own the master copy.
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Or a quick factsheet http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p01_uk_copyright_law
Acts that are allowed
Fair dealing is a term used to describe acts which are permitted to a certain degree without infringing the work, these acts are:
Private and research study purposes.
Performance, copies or lending for educational purposes.
Criticism and news reporting.
Incidental inclusion.
Copies and lending by librarians.
Acts for the purposes of royal commissions, statutory enquiries, judicial proceedings and parliamentary purposes.
Recording of broadcasts for the purposes of listening to or viewing at a more convenient time, this is known as "time shifting".
Producing a back up copy for personal use of a computer program.
Playing sound recording for a non profit making organisation, club or society.
(Profit making organisations and individuals should obtain a license from PRS for Music.)
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?
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.
What country are you in? Did you know that "Fair Use" in the USA is not the same as "Fair Use" in the UK? How fucking old are you? 14?
Given the tone of your response, I'm guessing you're, what - 15?
#DeleteChrome
Correct, we have no fair use right at the moment.
You're not going to get prosecuted for format-shifting for personal use, but it's not actually legal in this country.
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.
"Rip. Mix. Burn." Don't you watch TV? That was an Apple ad.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Your analogy is terrible. Using a car is not illegal; using this device at all in the UK, apparently, is.
The device was as legal as a car until the ASA said it wasn't.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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
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.
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.
Thirty years ago Bow Wow Wow charted a song called "C30 C60 C90 Go" which basically extolled the virtues of recording vinyl onto tape.
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:
...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
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
Another way to check the law is to complain to them about a Sony device, the NAS-SC500PK for instance. http://www.sony.co.uk/product/hdd-audio/nas-sc500pk is the page advertising it. I've sent in a complaint to the ASA about it - let's see if we can get Sony to fight the ASA to make format shifting declared legal.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe