Slashdot Mirror
UK's Legalization of CD Ripping Is Unlawful, Court Rules
Last year the UK finally passed legislation to make the copying and ripping of CDs for personal use legal. After the legislation passed, several groups of rightsholders applied for a judicial review, arguing that the change would cause financial harm to them. (They suggested an alternative: taxing blank CDs and storage devices, sharing the resulting funds among rightsholders.) Now, the UK's High Court issued a ruling that agrees with them: "the decision to introduce section 28B [private copying] in the absence of a compensation mechanism is unlawful." The exceptions in place for private copying are now unlawful, and the UK government will need to amend the legislation if it is to have any meaningful effect.
Please bring back a "Read more" or "View comments" link/button. It feels very unnatural to have to hunt for the # of comments or click the title.
> This attitude of piracy hasn't helped anything whatsoever. Before piracy, we had Trent Reznors, Joe Satriani, and many other good artists promoted.
If you think that "piracy" and "freeloading" are anything new then you're an idiot. Perhaps you're just some cluless tweener that's simply too young to have experienced the world "pre internet".
Entire sub-genres of music only got a foothold through rampant piracy before relevant gatekeepers decided to relent.
The idea of new bands being put through the meat grinder paying their dues is also nothing new. I guess they just whined about it less and just stuck it out.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Before piracy, we had Trent Reznors, Joe Satriani, and many other good artists promoted.
Uh, dude, you do realize that Nine Inch Nails have been uploading their new albums to torrent sites, right? Because they figured that exposure through those sites sold more copies of their music than trying to stop piracy?
And that piracy has been the norm since the invention of the cassette tape? What do you think those dual-tape cassette decks my generation grew up with were for?
Are you talking about the "Read 151 replies" link where an immensely pointless and stupid "Share" button is now?
How could you fail to miss that digit in the upper right corner of every front page article summary that rudely obscures part of the headline of the article? Yes, that is where it went. Or you could just click on the headline itself, which has worked since around the time that ENIAC was young.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The stronger law in this case is other national law which codifies our commitment to following our EU treaty obligations.
And in these cases, determining that a new law is "unlawful" - ie inconsistent with EU law - does not immediately remove said law or render it ineffective (although prosecutors may be wary of prosecuting based on it), but does oblige the government to modify the law *or otherwise* bring it in line with EU law within a reasonable timeframe.
In this particular case the judge agreed with the government on most of the substantive points raised. Where they fell down is that during the legislative process they accepted in principle that any changes must be justified by empirical evidence of their likely effect to be consistent with the tests and conditions mandated by the EU law which allowed for those changes to be made in the first place (in particular, a condition that any exception either do no significant harm to copyright holders, *or* that a levy be introduced to compensate for that harm). The judge found that said evidence (of lack of harm) was lacking, and therefore it could not be said that the new law was consistent with treaty obligations. It could not be said that it was *inconsistent* either, but the EU law required a positive assurance.
All that is now required is that the government make the new law consistent, and the judge suggested various options: they could repeal the law; they could introduce a levy; or they could find and supply new evidence that does convincingly show a lack of harm. That third option would render the law valid and require no additional changes to it.
> Thank you, pirates. You got your freebies, but you destroyed everything in the process and killed the music industry as a whole.
Gee, let's conveniently ignore the facts:
* http://www.bbc.com/news/techno... or http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
* https://torrentfreak.com/bitto...
* http://business.time.com/2013/...
All the numbers relating piracy to lost sales are complete imaginary and bullshit. There has never been a financial statement listing the dollar amount of piracy.
There is plenty of evidence to support BOTH sides of this argument but there is documentation that indicates piracy doesn't harm the music industry as much as they say it does and in some cases may increase sales:
CBCNews
Case for Promoting Online Sharing
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley