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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.
Rightsholders keep pushing the fact that we're buying a personal use license to the media when we buy a CD/DVD/etc, so why is making a mere copy for personal use unlawful in any way?
You can't have it both ways, greedy bastards.
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wtf did the comments links go?
CDs? Like people used to use in the latter part of the 1900s?
Next they'll say I can't make my own buggy whips.
That means that with that license to use, in perpetuity, if the media becomes damaged, then the rights holder will ship out, for free, replacement media for said license.
If they don't want to do that, then allowing license holders to make private backup copies of their licensed products is the only way to go.
Perhaps a major class-action lawsuit against the RIAA/MPAA and every Recording and Movie studio should be made to get a final decision on whether it's the media we purchase or the license so that they can no longer flip-flop which it is based on how they want to limit our rights.
Isn't by definition a new law legal (assuming it isn't against a constitution or any higher law)? Is the only threshold that it would not cause financial harm if that is the case most laws should be illegal as they all cause financial harm to someone.
They suggested an alternative: taxing blank CDs and storage devices, sharing the resulting funds among rightsholders
My company buys thousands of hard drives used for data centre storage and DVDs for backups. Why the hell should I pay extra for them so that the money is sent to the entertainment industry when no data that goes on those drives will ever relate to them?
Can we please get lightbulbs banned already, or at least tax them so that the candlemaking industry is compensated? Maybe horsebreeder and wagon makers should get a cut of car sales? Since when was it the government's job to protect corporate profits? I mean, guys, at least pretend...
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"Instead of keeping copies free, they suggested that a tax should be applied to blank media including blank CDs, hard drives, memory sticks and other blank media. This money would then be shared among rightsholders, a mechanism already operating in other European countries."
So in some European countries you already pay a royalty to music companies on all blank media regardless of the intended use? Does the Red Cross pay music company royalties on the blank SSDs in their new laptops? Do researchers at the large hadron collider pay a music royalty on the blank USB drives used to store their data? Do individuals pay music company royalties for the blank SD card used in their personal cameras?
You guys still haven't figured out this taxation without representation thing.
If you look at how commercially successful musicians made a living for the past 800-1000 years, its *always* been sponsored in a round about way by the rich & powerful of the time to serve their interests. Whether it was the church, aristocrats, or CEOs.
There was always folk/"pop" music you would have heard in taverns, schools, family gatherings, etc, but it wasn't until the invention of the phonograph that large portions of that were capable of being preserved and nobody every "made it big" hammering out drinking songs in the corner pub.
The explosion of recorded pop music that started in the 1910s - 1920s with jazz, ragtime, & similar only occurred because a special combination of technology, companies out to make a buck, and a relatively high level of disposable income. As time went on, the culturally uniting effects of music as well as increased available of technology with the radio, then record, and CD (with magnetic media scattered throughout) made it possible for companies to make ever increasing profit. They promoted artists to make more money. Period. You have to realize that very, very few of the total musicians for any given genre that has ever hugely taken off make any real money. How many jazz musicians do you think were working other jobs for every Miles Davis? How many singer song writers for every Jimmy Buffet out there are just smoking pot in their mom's basement and working at walmart? How many people are shredding on a Les Paul at corner bars for every Joe Satriani out there?
Point being, making pop music never has, and never will be a viable way to make a living for all but a very, very small portion of everyone who has an interest in making music.
What the internet has done for music that is I see as good on a whole, is made it possible for literally anyone on the planet to create a song that is heard by millions if only enough people actually like it. Sure, commercial entities can play a role, but the entire concept of a viral video is that it tugs at some common thread that runs prevalent enough through humanity as a whole to be of *interest* to millions in a day in age where attention spans are shorter than ever and there is more music at your finger tips that you could ever listen to in a hundred life times.
Sure, youtube sensations like "what does the fox say" and "gangam style" lack a certain degree of complexity and craftsmanship compared to, say for example the work of Led Zeppelin. But does that doesn't make them any less "good" in their own way.
The music industry that you seem to describe as knowing & loving from what I would say is the mid-to-late 1990s was just a brief "blip" in the much bigger history of music, that I agree is in inevitable decline, but such is the way of the universe.
Excellent rant. There's just one problem with it: piracy actually increases music sales.
I'm sure that some people have bought music after listening to a pirated version. I'm sure hundreds of times more people have not bought music because they already had the pirated copy. If you have some documentation that shows that there are more people that buy the music after pirating it than don't, I would love to see it and I'm sure that lots of other people do as well.
But that being said, there is no reason why the record industry has to give any kudos to people who pirated and then came back and bought later. I could go to the grocery store 1,000 times and pay for the groceries, but the one time I walk out without paying, they can have me arrested. Even if I then offer to pay them for the groceries, they can still hold up the charges.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Metalica, ironically enough, comes to mind. They had a following before they even had an official album, thanks to bootlegs of local gigs that started making rounds.
Exactly. I'd dub a copy from friends in elem. school until I'd saved enough allowance to buy the albums. Then I bought them again on CD later in high school/college, many of them more than once (damage, theft, etc.). Even the odd vinyl. By this time I was attending shows, buying merch.
Yet somehow we're the leeches. Gotcha.