Ripping - illegal in UK?

Technically, yes, it is illegal to rip CDs in the UK. The government tried to relax the law to allow copying for private use, but the high court kowtowed to the music industry, and overruled the decision.

There may be widespread illegal use of ripping hardware, but as long as there are other, legitimate uses of that hardware, nobody can stop the sale of it. Although I'm sure the music industry would try to do so if it thought it had a chance.

If the record companies had their way, we'd only have access to online libraries they can turn off. I'd not worry too much about this. The issue is not new. No law against making devices that rip. Same goes for almost anything. Yould use almost any obejct to do something illegal, but shops still sell stuff apparently. 

I've often contemplated that the day buying music in physical form or downloading to store locally is outlawed is the day I might actually just dump my hifi in a river and never listen to music again.

A close friend was studying to join the record industry, especially areas around copyright. She told me that if you are on the business side of the industry, it helps to not like music at all.

ChrisSU posted:

Technically, yes, it is illegal to rip CDs in the UK. The government tried to relax the law to allow copying for private use, but the high court kowtowed to the music industry, and overruled the decision.

True, though the government did leave an open goal for the industry - the government claimed it would cause negligible impact without doing any research to justify that was the case, so really the courts had no choice. This story seems to sum up the state of play in 2015.

I can't find anything about what happened to the EU harmonisation, but I guess that's all a bit academic now.

Yes and no. The case was about exceptions to EU copyright rules so if the UK isn’t bound by those rules post- Brexit, it has a free(er) hand. Turns out the Brexiteers are ripping merchants. Who knew?! 

The UK will be bound by those rules post-Brexit if the "Great Repeal Bill" has copied them into UK law or of course if they are already in UK law implementing the EU rules. (As a generalisation, EU directives will have had to be implemented into UK law whereas EU regulations have direct effect. So unless the situation is dealt with in the Repeal Bill, directives will continue to apply after we leave the EU and regulations won't.)

Otherwise it will be status quo which I believe means that there is nothing to say that you can make a copy for your own use, but neither is it explicitly banned (in the sense that me spreading a malicious rumour about my neighbour is banned).

I rather doubt that we will get any clarity anytime soon and in the meantime police raids on Naim's factory or Naim customers' homes are not likely.

best

David

Funny thing David - the EU directive is quite clear on the copyright proteciton. It seems that only the UK was overzealous in implementing it to a point of a current legislative nonsense.

Yes Adam I think the issue is that the member state government is supposed to consider the potential impact of its implementation on the copyright owners and the UK hadn't documented how it had done that, so its implementation was deemed unlawful and set aside. A mess basically!

best

David

Adam Zielinski posted:

...............   It seems that only the UK was overzealous in implementing it to a point of a current legislative nonsense.

.........  and only Chandos have taken the position to not release metadata.

Hope the data can be appended from other sources...

The UK copyright law (1988) predated the EU directive I think. So not "overzealous" implementation.

EU directives override pat local legislation though...

Not if the local legislation goes further...

Dozey posted:

The UK copyright law (1988) predated the EU directive I think. So not "overzealous" implementation.

Indeed. As always with EU directives the member state was supposed to modify domestic law, including existing national law or absence of national law, to reflect the directive. In implementing the EU directive, the UK built in a provision for owners of copies of recordings (e.g. CDs) to make further copies for their own personal use and it was this provision that was deemed unlawful because in making such a provision, the UK Government hadn't demonstrated that it had given due regard as to how the legitimate interests of copyright owners would be protected.

This was why the UK implementation, or that piece of it anyway, was set aside by the ECJ. So this was in no way overzealous implementation by the UK. Just poorly executed implementation, which arguably resulted in under-implementation.

best

David

Dozey posted:

Not if the local legislation goes further...

It's not quite that simple, because the local legislation cannot go further if it conflicts with the intentions of new directive. The new directive would need to be silent on the relevant rights and responsibilities that the local law wishes to retain or add.

best

David

Yes you are right. It was the High Court not the ECJ.

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David

Is this why the likes of Amazon give you access to the Mp3 version if you buy the CD through Amazon music.

There is still the right to make a single copy for the purpose of back-up.  To justify why this is necessary I and many others have one or more CDs that have deteriorated to the point where some portions have become unreadable, despite being stored in a normal domestic environment - look up CD 'bronzing'.

However, even beyond that, in order for the someone to successfully sue you for making and using a copy of the material they would also have to show material loss (so long as you are not profiting from it, it's a civil offence so the CPS won't be interested).  Provided you only use one copy, it's unlikely that any such argument would succeed, it's likely that any such single personal use of the copyright material would be considered 'fair dealing'.

Yes I agree with Huge.

best

David

feeling_zen posted:

I've often contemplated that the day buying music in physical form or downloading to store locally is outlawed is the day I might actually just dump my hifi in a river and never listen to music again.

 

Dumping hifi in a river is illegal too!  ;-)

The private copy thing was the reason for many governments to extra tax usb drives / flash memory / harddrives etc ...

OK, seems we need a summary.  For fair dealing, we are not just talking about a private copy in addition to the original.

For the 'fair dealing, including the purpose of backup' defence you need to meet certain criteria...

1  Only one copy of the copyright material must be in use at any one time (the other copy is for backup purposes only).
2  You must retain the original as evidence of a licence to use the copyright material (whether it is in a usable condition or not).

If you use the CDs you can justify keeping a copy for backup purposes - however you may not use this backup copy for any purpose other than backup and restore of the CD.

If you use the ripped copy you must retain the original CD - however you may not use the CD for any purpose other than backup and restore of the ripped copy, packing them away in a box in a relatively inaccessible place would be sufficient evidence of this.

The problem is that the statute is open to interpretation, and there is no case law to show that a back up copy is actually non-infringing in the UK. We are talking here about works in electronic form - not computer programs.

In practice, no record label will go after a person for streaming in private if they keep the original CD, as they would not be able to prove any damage to them.

Dozey posted:

The problem is that the statute is open to interpretation, and there is no case law to show that a back up copy is actually non-infringing in the UK. We are talking here about works in electronic form - not computer programs.

In practice, no record label will go after a person for streaming in private if they keep the original CD, as they would not be able to prove any damage to them.

In UK copyright law, a computer programme is a work in electronic form.

But yes the damage aspect is key - hence only one copy to be in use at a time.

But a work in electronic form is not necessarily a computer program - e.g. it might be an audio data file being a musical work.