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UK To Finally Legalize Ripping CDs and DVDs

Posted by Soulskill on from the only-20-years-too-late dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news that the U.K. government will finally legalize the copying of data from CDs, DVDs, and other types of media for personal use. This will allow U.K. citizens to legally make backups and digital copies of their media, which has been forbidden by copyright law previously. The changes will go into effect this June. It also grants permission for people to upload the ripped media to a remote host, though sharing of course remains illegal. "The mismatch between the law and public opinion became apparent through a Government-commissioned survey, which found that 85% of consumers already thought that DVD and CD ripping was legal. More than one-third of all consumers admitted that they’d already made copies of media they purchased. Besides the new private copying rights, the upcoming amendments will also broaden people’s fair use rights. For example, people no longer have to ask permission to quote from or parody the work of others, such as a news report or a book, as long as it’s “fair dealing” and the source is recognized."

28 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... I can rip my music CDs and play them on my Diamond Rio MP3 player.

    1. Re: Finally by Atl+Rob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's not like it wasn't happening already for personal use. It was un-enforceable on a personal level anyway. Nice to see some common sense in laws for a change. The industry has been continually shooting themselves in the foot by not embracing new tech in a consumer friendly way.

    2. Re:Finally by someone1234 · · Score: 2

      Take care, unsanctioned public broadcasts are still prohibited. So, tune it down :D

      --
      Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
  2. Grrr... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    But what about those of us who want to rip Betamax, Casettes, Grammerphone Records and VHS?

    1. Re: Grrr... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Out of copyright? Copyright ends as soon as Chernobyl is no longer radioactive, which we estimate is 10,000 years.

    2. Re:Grrr... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      No that is why Walt Disney is in a cryronics pod - lifetime plus 70 years == to infinity and beyond

  3. That didn't take long. by _Shorty-dammit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But what about cassettes?

  4. What about copy protection. by leuk_he · · Score: 4, Interesting

    DVD are still mostly copy protected by the highly ineffective CCS copy protection. blue ray are more effectively protected, but the protection still is breakable by a lot of tools.

    by european law is decided:
    "the following anti-circumventing rules were implemented in European Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the council of May 22, 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

    This directive states in article 6, 'Obligations as to technological measures':

            Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective.
    "

    So you may copy it, but if you break ANY technlogical measure, you an still be sued by the content mafia fpr breaking copy protection technology. So think twice before you make a guide on your homepage how to copy a dvd.

    1. Re:What about copy protection. by ledow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sorry, but CSS isn't a copy protection technology of any kind. It's easily defeated within a matter of seconds on any modern PC. Legally, sure, but then if you're allowed to make an archive copy, that's your legal "right" and the industry would have to take you to court to decide which wins, and it will be expensive and (potentially) catastrophic for them to try it.

      What pisses me off ten times more is the "unreadable sectors" copy protection. It means that I've never watched a DVD on my laptop as all the ones I've tried have that shit and even with properly licensed DVD playing software and a DVD compliant drive, I can't watch it.

      So what do I do? I run it through one of the programs that just sucks the data off and ignore the errors, which leaves me with only "CSS" to defeat and half the time it's not worth the bother - leave it on, let the player worry about it and 99% of the time I only ever play from European region anyway so it doesn't hinder things to use something set in European region for CSS decryption.

      To be honest the things that piss me off go in the order:

      - Unreadable sectors
      - Blocked UOPS
      - Too much shit on the beginning of the movie (sometimes MINUTES before you can even get to the main menu).
      - The law about making a backup of a product I have in my hands for my own, personal, reasonable usage (so I don't wear my discs out and have easy access to the content).
      - CSS

    2. Re:What about copy protection. by Z34107 · · Score: 5, Informative

      You should stop giving them money. Besides the inherent silliness in paying for a product you know to be broken, you're also financing the next ACTA or TPP.

      Buying DVDs is donating to the Taliban of copyright law.

      --
      DATABASE WOW WOW
    3. Re:What about copy protection. by symbolset · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If you can break it then it isn't effective and breaking it is therefore legal, eh?

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    4. Re:What about copy protection. by tqk · · Score: 2

      I've never had a problem watching a DVD on a Mac.

      What happens when a buddy from EU sends you a disk of EU region code?

      --
      "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
    5. Re:What about copy protection. by queazocotal · · Score: 3, Interesting

      By this exact same argument, many house-locks deployed are not 'security', and breaking them is therefore not a crime.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - I recommend.

      A feature being ineffectual generally does not mean that it's not relevant, unless the law specifically says that the feature must be effective against skilled attackers.

    6. Re:What about copy protection. by FireFury03 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      DVD are still mostly copy protected by the highly ineffective CCS copy protection. blue ray are more effectively protected, but the protection still is breakable by a lot of tools.

      I believe that EU courts have declared CSS to not be "effective copy protection", so it is legally breakable.

      However, this new legislation does seem fairly worthless because the "consumer guide" that the government has released says that you still don't have the right to break DRM in order to exercise your new right to copy CDs/DVDs/ebooks/etc.

      To be honest, I'm surprised how widely the population has accepted ebooks, given how restrictive the licensing terms and DRM are. For example, if you buy a paper book, you can read it, then your wife can read it, you can lend it to a friend/relative to read, then it can sit on your book shelf for 20 years until your kids read it. All of this stuff has been considered "normal" usage for a book - people expect to be able to do this stuff and it seems reasonable to them. Now compare to an ebook - lets take a Google Play book as an example: you "buy" it and you can read it. Then when your wife wants to read it, she has to buy her own copy. You can't lend it to a friend - they have to buy their own too. In 20 years time, your kids will have to buy their own copies (although I have serious doubts that you will still be able to get at your purchased ebooks by that time anyway). There is no mechanism within Play to let you lend books to friends or family and the licence even prevents you from letting someone else read it on your own tablet. To me, all this seems completely unreasonable and I'm really surprised that everyone else doesn't think so to, given that all this stuff has been accepted practice for hundreds of years. Of course, you can choose to strip the DRM and/or break the licence terms, but to my mind what's the point in paying for the content in the first place if you're going to be forced into breaking the law anyway?

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
    7. Re:What about copy protection. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The new law actually takes this into account. If you buy something in a format with 'digital locks' that prevent format shifting, you may write to the Secretary of State for permission to break the locks. This will be granted, unless the same item is available in a format without digital locks. The upshot of this is that if you sell DRM-free media in the UK, then you can force people to buy a second copy to format shift (but only once), but if you don't then they can format shift whatever encumbered format they want.

      This means that breaking DRM is explicitly legal in the UK, unless the same media is available without DRM (in which case there's little reason to bother breaking the DRM - you could just buy it in a more friendly format). I'm really looking forward to the Secretary of State receiving thousands of letters a day from people asking to rip their DVDs. Don't forget: you can send one letter per DVD you own...

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  5. As a citizen of the UK by MCROnline · · Score: 2, Funny

    May I be one of the first to say to my fellow UK citizens... Welcome to the 20th Century. Oh...wait..Oh well, better late than never.

  6. Good luck by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Audio outputs temporarily muted. Do not adjust the playback volume. The content being played is protected by Cinavia and is not authorized for playback on this device. For more information, see http://www.cinavia.com./ Message Code 3."

    --

    "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    1. Re:Good luck by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      PROTIP: Never buy the DRM version, get the torrent instead. Buying the crippled version just encourages them to keep doing it.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:Good luck by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Informative

      This relies on the player to look for Cinavia. Blu-ray players do. That's about it. Your rip doesn't work on the bluray player? Pop it on a USB drive and play it on the TV, or via a media centre over the network, or via a DVR.

      I run RaspBMC for my media centre. Do you think the XBMC community is all giddy at the opportunity to include such a user friendly feature like Cinavia?

    3. Re:Good luck by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 4, Interesting
      The torrented version up to this point had 3 ways to go with this:
      1. - Rip from bluray and tell people trying to play it on a smart appliance that detects the cinavia watermark "lol ur stewpid. Get real hardware loser" or "OMG it plays on my laptop via VLC fine. Shut up n00b."
      2. - Maim the audio stream to an unintelligible mess to the point the water mark isn't detected, but deal with the fact that you can't even tell what you are hearing most of the time
      3. - Rip the audio stream from the DVD copy and match it up with the bluray video stream

      The last was the most popular until recently where they are putting cinavia in the audio tracks of the DVDs as well now.

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    4. Re:Good luck by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Most set to smart media players are shipping with Cinavia. Roku, Netgear NeoTV, now WDTV Live, to name a popular few implement Cinavia protection. Going forward it will eventually be all of them.

      I'm not even going to comment on your other "solutions".

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    5. Re:Good luck by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Cinavia is usually only used on the North American release of movies, so as long as you rip from a clean source (e.g. European release) you are fine. I have modern equipment that allegedly supports Cinavia and have not had playback issues with torrents. As usual the pirate version is better quality than the paid one.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    6. Re:Good luck by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      You say "most" I say you've named a few, and of those you've mentioned a google search shows some of them don't actually have Cinavia. Also my parent's WDTV Live plays Cinavia content without issue. Also every model of WDTV I've seen released on the local market is listed on Slysoft's site as not containing Cinavia, hence it also doesn't support BluRay menus. A quick google search shows most of Netgear NeoTVs don't implement it either despite talk of it in the market material.

      The only equipment mandated to required Cinavia is blueray players and even some of those don't implement it.

      As for using some condescending quotes when talking about my other solutions, stop being childish. Most Smart TVs these days will happily stream videos over the network, have USB ports and will happily play anything you throw at it. The only reason I have XBMC running at all is because my TV doesn't do library management. If however you were calling XBMC a "solution" in the same condescending way then feel free to keep doing what you're doing, movies must suck when you only get the first 20min of audio. Or just buy an Apple TV which is also Cinavia free, oh and Apple TV would qualify as "most" in this case given it's market share.

      None of this really matters though. As is always the case when DRM is forced on users they will bypass it. No one cared until it was mandated in bluray players last year. Now suddenly AnyDVD has defeated all software BluRay players from detecting it, DVDFab apparently has worked around copying discs (though no word on ripping yet), and as of November there's been plenty of chatter around forums to suggest the DRM scheme will fall sometime this year. Though right now you can buy just about any media centre on the market which isn't a BluRay player and isn't a Roku and be just fine.

  7. Meanwhile back in the land of the not so free ... by Zorlon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.myce.com/news/break...

    --
    - Things are the way they are because they're coded that way -
  8. Woot! by Spottywot · · Score: 2

    It's finally legal to do something that no-one could be bothered to harass me for doing when it was illegal. I feel freer already.

    --
    In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
    1. Re:Woot! by mrbester · · Score: 2

      The 85% who thought it wasn't illegal to make a backup were correct as it isn't illegal to do so. However, it was a copyright infringement to do so. So you have something you are entitled to do that is also illegal. Since your consumer rights trump a civil misdemeanour (never tested, but your rights are inviolable) no one wanted the hassle of upholdng that law.

      --
      "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
  9. Copying (most) DVDs still illegal by carvell · · Score: 2

    As noted in this report, Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) (i.e. CSS) are still protected:

    "Consistent with the approach taken in relation to other exceptions, no reference to TPMs is made within draft Section 28B. Effective TPMs which prevent copying of copyright materials will however continue to be protected, separately to copyright protection, under Section 296ZA CDPA, and circumvention of such measures will continue to be prohibited."

  10. Burying the lead? by AAWood · · Score: 2

    I'm more interested in this part:

    People no longer have to ask permission to quote from or parody the work of others, such as a news report or a book, as long as it’s “fair dealing” and the source is recognized.

    As a Brit who does indeed already back up my media, yeah, it's cool that that's moving from "illegal but unenforceable and unenforced" to "legal", but finally getting proper Fair Use laws? That's major. With the increasing use of digital media as primary, disc ripping is on the decline anyway, while home-grown content creation and mixing is definitely on the rise. That will have a much larger effect on more people, now and moving forwards.