UK Legalizes CD Ripping and Cloud Backups Today

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It would seem that our brothers and sisters across the pond will now be able to legally back up their movies and music for personal use.

Starting today UK citizens are free to copy MP3s, CDs, DVDs and live broadcasts for personal use. After an unexpected delay, UK copyright law was amended to legalize this common form of copying. In addition, the changes also broaden other forms of fair use, including parody and quotation rights.
 
slow_clap_citizen_kane.gif
 
Great news, although I can see the "cloud backup" being abused as a defense for file sharing cases.
 
In 6 years from now, when we have a new buzzword, "cloud" will be so "2010". :)
 
but but my precious intellectual property
IP, meet fair use. Glad to know ya.

Make enough laws and eventually everyone is made a criminal. There was and is no other eventuality for them, or for any other country. In our case it means repeal of the DMCA and internet traffic being given constitutional protections in our country. Regardless of what Comcast and Sony might claim our constitutional rights to free speech, privacy and the rest do not simply vanish the instant we go online. Or use a telephone. Or mail a package.
 
Everybody do your best Wallace Shaun impression...

"Inconceivable!"

Glad to know common sense is finally prevailing in some small measure somewhere
 
UK is always ahead in the West when it comes to making ideal laws. I really wish the West would follow some of the UKs practices.
 
Starting today UK citizens are free to copy MP3s, CDs, DVDs and live broadcasts for personal use.

In other news, you may now add sugar and other additives to your coffee at will.
 
Never happen here. The owners of our Government wouldn't allow it.
 
Never happen here. The owners of our Government wouldn't allow it.

Actually, it did. For a while we could make personal backups. Then big media proposed and lobbied for the passing of the DMCA. Once that passed, they encrypted everything or put some kind of anti-copy scheme on it.. So you can legitimately make personal back ups of media that contains no copy protection scheme or is not encrypted.

An the debate over bit-to-bit copying, even though you are not circumventing or breaking the copy protection, activist judges still deem that as violating the DMCA.
 
Actually, it did. For a while we could make personal backups.

Yep, specifically, there was the 1998 Fairness in Music Licensing Act which applied a tax to initial purchase price of blank CD-R's and home audio recording devices.

This is why in the early days of home CD audio burners there were CD-R's that specifically said "For Audio" On them. CD-R's sold as data only were exempt from this tax. CD's had this distinction because CD-R's also served legitimate secondary roles in the computer industry as general data usage. However other media such as Minidisc that were not marketed in America for data usage (though data drives did exist) were all subject to the tax.

tdkmusiccdrw.jpg


The RIAA was able to levy a tax on ALL blank media meant for music recording because they said it would be used for copying music anyways.
 
Now what I do wonder is how this will tie in to data duplication on the server end. For those not aware, if 1000 people store the same song on a server, legally the server has to keep individual copies of the song rather than store 1 copy and distribute it to 1000 people. Some cloud services are able to work out deals with the RIAA to get around this (think iTunes), but general servers are not allowed to do it because they do not have express permission from the RIAA for that copyright.

If you acknowledge that users can legally store a copy of something on a remote server, then you acknowledge that that server has the right to store that data. Thus should the server legally be protected in storing that data efficiently?
 
^^ i recall friends buying the "audio" blanks believing they were better quality... silly people
 
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