UK Gov't Plans To Give 'Greater Freedom To Use Copyright Works'

crimperman writes "The U.K. government is planning to change their copyright laws to give 'greater freedom' on usage. The Dept. for Business Innovation and Skills say the new measures 'include provisions to allow copying of works for personal use parody and for the purposes of quotation.' (There is currently no 'fair use' law in the U.K.) They also say the provisions 'allow people to use copyright works for a variety of ... purposes without permission from the copyright owners,' and 'bring up to date the provisions for education use.' A sensible copyright law from the U.K.? What are the chances of this getting through?"

Comments

Ying and yang

[Tx]

It's like they had to balance out the stupid lame, half-baked porn filter law they just announced with something that actually made a bit of sense. Although knowing our government as I do, I'll wait until I've seen the small print, before I assume that the headlines are actually in tune with the reality of the proposals.

Things the UK government / agencies want

[gnasher719]

First, they want to change laws that make basically everybody in the UK a criminal. It seems that when you buy a CD, ripping it onto your Mac makes you a criminal, downloading it onto your iPod makes you a criminal again. Same when you download music from Amazon and put that onto your iPod (or your Android phone, doesn't make a difference). Clearly if everyone went to jail who did that, then the only ones left outside would be half a dozen pensioners. (On the other hand, if all those criminals who happen to be judges were taken to court first, then the whole thing wouldn't work).

The other thing that the government wants is to make it easier for businesses to use other people's work. Like take the works of some professional photographer, remove all the metadata, and then voila! you can't find out anymore who created it, so businesses are now free to use it.

Proper citations please

[MrNemesis]

Can we get some links from the Daily Mail please? As a UK citizen I don't think there's enough reactionary nonsense from the Daily Fail posted on slashdot as journalistic fact!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2251617/Video-mash-ups-song-parodies-legalised-just-long-funny.html

I'm sure some editors will be able to spin this as proof that the UK is somehow living in a mish-mash between 1984 and Mad Max.

On a more serious note, I'm amazed that our government would do something so sensible (especially in denying the "storage tax") merely 15 years too late, and since our governments of the last decade appear to be living out of the back pockets of the financial and entertainment industries, I'm wondering what other copyright reforms will be riding on the back of this. Call my cynical (or maybe reading too much sensationalist nonsense), but whenever I've seen a move for the better regarding copyright in the other first-world countries, it's always come with a whole shedload of "...just one more thing!" provisos, such as blank media taxes and three-strikes rules. Perhaps those will come up in the next few days and be buried over christmas...

Fair Dealing

[Bogtha]

There is currently no 'fair use' law in the U.K.

There is, it's called "fair dealing".

Re:Fair Dealing

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That is true, but they aren't direct equivalents: the US concept of fair use is built on general principles, but the UK concept of fair dealing enumerates specific exceptions to copyright.

That set of exceptions is currently absurdly small by modern standards; you know you've gone crazy when even Big Media is saying in public that it won't go after people for doing things that aren't considered "fair" in this way! But there's nothing adaptive about the underlying law (unlike fair use in the US) so advancing technology has left it behind.

After several high-profile formal reviews of UK IP laws that each led almost nowhere despite invariably proposing a bunch of reasonably and widely supported changes, it seems like pretty much everyone is fed up of having daft laws on the books that make the UK look like some backwater village rather than a major centre for creative and technology advancement. Hopefully we really will see sensible change now, particularly with regard to things like format shifting, and hopefully also the whole DRM-nullifies-all-related-freedoms problem.

Re:Behind the times

[StoneyMahoney]

It won't be coming any time soon - business secretary Vince Cable specifically refused to refused any levies like that when the EU asked us to implement them.

Re:How did they manage

[itsdapead]

Without fair use provisions until now?

I do not understand how society could even function if you cannot at least quote with citations someone else without breaking the law.

As others have said, short quotations are OK.

As for the format shifting/ripping thing, everybody just ignores it. In the UK, even the recording industry isn't terminally stupid enough to prosecute people copying a CD they bought onto a MP3 player. However, if you make hardware that rips CDs then be careful how you advertise it (Note: before you start frothing at the mouth too much, these people weren't prosecuted - they were just told by the independent advertising industry watchdog to change their advert, because someone raised a complaint that was petty but legally correct).

Re:Behind the times

[bsDaemon]

Try setting it ti 'murrican and see if it turns out differently