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UK Court Rules iTunes Illegal


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iTunes is now basically illegal in the UK

 

Excerpt:

 

The United Kingdom’s High Court just ruled that copying music from your personal CD collection to iTunes violates copyright law—and so does backing up your music library to an external hard drive or cloud storage service.

 

“It is now unlawful to make private copies of copyright works you own, without permission from the copyright holder—this includes format shifting from one medium to another,” a UK IPO spokesperson told the site.

Best,

 

Geoff

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I thought that's been the law all along - USA the same.

 

Just yet another one of those ever-increasing unenforceable, ubiquitously violated laws.

 

Does this mean the U.K. will actually take some action against iTunes (and some other uncountable numbers of violators, businesses and persons??)

 

nat whilk ii

 

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Couldn't get that link to work or find the article on Macworld, but I found this:

 

"It is now unlawful to make private copies of copyright works you own, without permission from the copyright holder – this includes format shifting from one medium to another," a spokesperson told the site.

 

Using iTunes is now illegal under UK copyright law

 

It's an absurd intrusion on music and software licensee rights, seems to me, but it's their country, I guess.

 

This also would then appear to make Google's personal music locker (the free part of Google Music) which has been in operation for quite a few years, illegal.

 

The European nations seem to be even more in the pocket of 'Big IP' than the US.

 

As a songwriter and artist, I'm a big believer in intellectual property rights -- but there's got to be sensible balance between the rights of content providers and licensees -- or we'll just continue to see rampant abuse.

 

It has not escaped everyone's attention that as the music business has (slowly and painfully) become more responsive to users' desires to make full use of modern technology to enjoy the music they license, that piracy has diminished.

 

 

(And it's very interesting, seems to me, that one of the latest and largest studies of music consumer behavior has found that among the biggest spenders on music are also some of the biggest illegal downloaders, supporting earlier data as well as the opinions of many fans and industry observers.)

 

 

The Independent points out that this is far from the first seemingly absurd overextension of government power over the individual in the UK: The Government may have just banned everything

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Who is going to enforce that one?

 

If you're paranoid, encrypt your external drive and store your duplicates there.

 

Data can get corrupted. I keep a backup of everything I buy. -- I paid for it, and I want it to last through a hard drive crash or whatever. That's OK in the USA.

 

But I don't share them with anyone else, that's not only illegal but in my opinion unethical.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

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In the US, it's legal, at least in the next-to-last revision of the copyright rules, to make a copy on alternate media for your convenience in playback. The record companies weren't happy about this because they wanted you to buy both the phonograph record to play at home and the cassette to play in your car. That's the time frame where the "alternate media" was made legal.

 

If you own a CD, you can copy it to a memory stick and play it in your car. If you paid for a song download or a subscribe to a streaming service, your ownership may be in question, so making a copy to play in your car may not be legal.

 

Ask a lawyer. Then ask another one if you don't like the answer.

 

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If you own a CD, you can copy it to a memory stick and play it in your car. If you paid for a song download or a subscribe to a streaming service, your ownership may be in question, so making a copy to play in your car may not be legal.

 

Even if you "owned" a LP or CD, that didn't give you ownership of the material - just as with a song download, you're just licensing the use of it under specified conditions and with certain limitations. Unless there's some difference in the contract covering the download, I don't see how the legal uses of the song would be fundamentally any different than if you bought a CD with the same song on it.

 

Ask a lawyer. Then ask another one if you don't like the answer.

 

Boy, isn't THAT the truth!

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Yup - here in the USA you can make a copy if you are backing up one you already purchased, but not if you plan on distributing it to someone else. That is considered to be fair use under US law. You can also tape something to watch it later - that was decided as part of the Sony vs. Universal City Studios "Betamax" SCOTUS case.

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Yes, Disney vs. Betamax solved that issue here.

 

"Fair use" is four standards that allow use of copyrighted work under particular circumstances. For example, if I'm reviewing a recording and talk about how great the lyrics are, I can quote some of them to get my point across even though they're copyrighted.

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If you own a CD, you can copy it to a memory stick and play it in your car. If you paid for a song download or a subscribe to a streaming service, your ownership may be in question, so making a copy to play in your car may not be legal.

 

 

Even if you "owned" a LP or CD, that didn't give you ownership of the material - just as with a song download, you're just licensing the use of it under specified conditions and with certain limitations. Unless there's some difference in the contract covering the download, I don't see how the legal uses of the song would be fundamentally any different than if you bought a CD with the same song on it.

 

Also, copying to another medium for a different use isn't really okay...you're only given license to copy the material for backup purposes in the event the original copy is lost or damaged. As stated in my linked article:

 

"Creating a copy of a copyrighted work for yourown ease of use is likely to be considered copyright infringement."

 

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I didn't have high speed internet when Napster was all the rage. My niece's former husband at the time was all a'twitter about it at the time. I downloaded about 4 songs, On dialup it was painfully long. The songs I downloaded were songs I had already purchased on vinyl. The download times were what killed it for me. The piracy aspects bothered me as well.

 

Napster was for all intents and purposes, dead and gone by the time I got Broadband. All the MP3's I've aquired since then have been through Amazon. I PAID for them. I've backed them all up on an external hard drive in case the drive I've got them for everyday use goes South.

 

I've also taken RTR tapes I had music on, processed them a bit and saved them as MP3's. All the material I had on RTR was mostly vinyl records, that I recorded as soon as I bought the records, so that I could capture that music virginal, if you will..Before my formerly pot stained fingers could scratch the records up.

 

What is next? Can I be prosecuted for humming a tune written by another whilst sitting in traffic?

 

 

 

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Also, copying to another medium for a different use isn't really okay...you're only given license to copy the material for backup purposes in the event the original copy is lost or damaged. As stated in my linked article:

 

"Creating a copy of a copyrighted work for your own ease of use is likely to be considered copyright infringement."

 

Here's what's wrong. I thought we were supposed to be protecting intellectual property. But if I have to pay for a CD, then pay for a download so I can listen to something on my phone, then pay again for something to go on the MP3 player in a car, that's protecting the distribution medium, not the intellectual property.

 

The way I see it (and at one point, I made a decent living from record royalties so it's not like I don't want to get paid) when I buy a physical embodiment of a song, I'm licensing the right to hear the song, and I should be able to hear it any way I want.

 

Copyright is about controlling the means of distribution. I don't think it's necessary to control the means of distribution to the same person over and over again.

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That is strange. Whatever the reason, you can now find it here:

 

http://www.macworld.com/article/2960...-terrible.html

 

(I've now fixed the link in the opening post.)

 

Best,

 

Geoff

 

Forgive my paranoia. :)

 

Somebody in this country (Ireland) has the power to delete posts from Facebook which criticise our government. It's happened to me. So when I see any 404'd article of this nature, I usually assume that it's down to corporate or political interference.

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Here's what's wrong. I thought we were supposed to be protecting intellectual property. But if I have to pay for a CD, then pay for a download so I can listen to something on my phone, then pay again for something to go on the MP3 player in a car, that's protecting the distribution medium, not the intellectual property.

 

The way I see it (and at one point, I made a decent living from record royalties so it's not like I don't want to get paid) when I buy a physical embodiment of a song, I'm licensing the right to hear the song, and I should be able to hear it any way I want.

 

Copyright is about controlling the means of distribution. I don't think it's necessary to control the means of distribution to the same person over and over again.

 

I agree completely, it's a mess. Back when most of these laws were written, there was basically one medium, pressed vinyl (okay, you could find reel-to-reel sometimes) and there were no portable means of playing recorded music. That's completely different today, but the law hasn't really changed. I doubt the record industry cares to push for legal changes, since any further allowances would be perceived as cutting into their profitability.

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It's a problem when the government introduces something they think is well-meaning in a world where they know nothing. At one point California was going to mandate putting a copycode-type chip in every digital recording device before it could be sold. I called up the person sponsoring the legislation and said that meant retrofitting musical instruments, toys, telephones, etc. and that would be both impossible and cost-prohibitive. The Amazingly, my single call killed the bill - not because I gave money to a politician :) but because he simply needed more data. I provided the data.

 

So here we have courts trying to make a ruling without understanding the purpose of copyright, which was to make sure that the creators of intellectual property had some say over how it was distributed ("the right to copy"). I just can't imagine any musician wanting to control whether someone who bought a CD could play it in a car or not. They want to control whether the music goes beyond that person, without compensation to the artist.

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I just can't imagine any musician wanting to control whether someone who bought a CD could play it in a car or not. They want to control whether the music goes beyond that person, without compensation to the artist.

 

However, most of the time the copyright is sold from the artist to the music corporation - and the corporation is only concerned with making money, so they do want the person to pay for each time they listen, no matter the media type, and they have the lobbyist who can 'persuade' Congress to pass laws that give them the stick to enforce it.

 

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That's what Win 10 is for. It seeks out illegal copies of software and music and contacts legal authorities or the manufacturers of that software so they can take action.

 

I'm thinking you're joking. If not, do you have more info on this because I have seen zero that would suggest such a thing. (Of course, there was much discussion whether MS's policies were going to allow pirated copies of Windows to be updated, more info here: http://www.cnet.com/news/windows-10-pirated-upgrades-will-still-be-considered-pirated/ )

 

 

If this isn't a joke, could you point us toward info on this? Like I said, I've heard nothing about this -- and, frankly, it seems highly unlikely.

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It's a problem when the government introduces something they think is well-meaning in a world where they know nothing. At one point California was going to mandate putting a copycode-type chip in every digital recording device before it could be sold. I called up the person sponsoring the legislation and said that meant retrofitting musical instruments, toys, telephones, etc. and that would be both impossible and cost-prohibitive. The Amazingly, my single call killed the bill - not because I gave money to a politician smile.png but because he simply needed more data. I provided the data.

 

So here we have courts trying to make a ruling without understanding the purpose of copyright, which was to make sure that the creators of intellectual property had some say over how it was distributed ("the right to copy"). I just can't imagine any musician wanting to control whether someone who bought a CD could play it in a car or not. They want to control whether the music goes beyond that person, without compensation to the artist.

 

Thank you! I saw word of that proposed bill back then and I just groaned...

 

FWIW, I completely agree on the content/media thing.

 

An analogy -- maybe a stretch but still on point -- would be trying to extract a separate licensing fee for having a sighted person -- or better yet a read-bot -- read a blind person's legally purchased book to him.

 

Of course, the really amusing thing is that, in the US, used music and video media and books are bought and sold freely, with content creators receiving nothing. So, for example, the same book could be read by hundreds of people, sold scores of times, much money made by resellers, and the author STILL only receive royalty for the first sale.

 

People in the UK and Europe can't believe how inconsistent and illogical US copyright laws are -- but it's largely because they are in large part crafted not by legislators -- but by lobbyists working for large, vested interests like publishers and big media companies.

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but it's largely because they are in large part crafted not by legislators -- but by lobbyists working for large, vested interests like publishers and big media companies.

 

Of course to be fair, this happens only with big media companies. :)

 

 

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Of course to be fair, this happens only with big media companies. smile.png

 

 

Well, there's a lot of difference between a recognized authority in a tech field volunteering facts and analysis on a given topic to a given legislator, with no exchange of money or political favor and that legislator pulling the proposed legislation on the merits of those facts and analysis.

 

If, indeed, that's where you were going. wink.png

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