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UK Copyright Reforms Legalize Back-Ups, Protect Parody

Posted by timothy on from the thank-you-sirs-may-I-copy-another? dept.

rastos1 writes A law has come into effect that permits UK citizens to make copies of CDs, MP3s, DVDs, Blu-rays and e-books. Consumers are allowed to keep the duplicates on local storage or in the cloud. While it is legal to make back-ups for personal use, it remains an offence to share the data with friends or family. Users are not allowed to make recordings of streamed music or video from Spotify and Netflix, even if they subscribe to the services. Thirteen years after iTunes launched, it is now legal to use it to rip CDs in the UK. Just as interesting are the ways that the new UK law explicitly, if imperfectly, protects parody.

3 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Also interesting for what they missed out by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is progress of a sort, though it has been a very long road with many false starts.

    Even so, it's interesting to see what they didn't include. For example, notice that almost none of the changes affect software at all, nor do they help at all with content that is protected by technical measures for DRM purposes.

    In other words, those who want to remain legal are still at the mercy of content providers doing things that may or may not work reliably, may or may not interfere with the normal operation of computers/mobile devices, may or may not cause huge problems with restoring access to purchased content if such devices fail, etc.

    Don't be fooled. A lot of the apparent improvements in this new law are immediately negated by technical measures.

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    1. Re:Also interesting for what they missed out by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

      At least it's not illegal to [circumvent technical measures].

      Yes, it still is. That's the point. Almost all of the theoretical benefits of these changes can immediately be nullified, because all the content provider has to do is apply technical measures and then breaking those measures remains against the law even if the copy would otherwise now be legal.

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      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    2. Re:Also interesting for what they missed out by PPH · · Score: 4, Interesting

      technical measures for DRM purposes.

      DRM? I thought it was just corrupted data* on the original media. I downloaded this nice piece of software that appears to recover the data quite effectively and made my legal copy.

      *It must have been corrupted. It wouldn't play on my Linux system.

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