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sungate.co.uk

sungate.co.uk

Ramblings about stuff

Copying for personal use allowed

The British Phonographic Industry announced that making copies of music for personal use “is OK”:

“We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties and make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format we will not pursue them.”

Well, that’s good news. So why then are digital downloads encumbered with DRM and some CDs now carrying “anti-copying” measures?

Perhaps they’re saying “it’s fine to copy your CDs, so long as you can figure out how to do so by circumventing the copy-protection mechanism” … ? Who knows.

Another positive piece of progress is that The All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group suggested that all digital content which has restrictions on its use should be clearly labelled in a consistent and helpful way, rather like food labelling. “Won’t Work On Your IPod” would be a good start, I guess…

Digital downloading of music is still in its infancy and I think that, as people start to acquire more and more DRM-ed music and realise how much it restricts them, there will be a strong backlash against it. DON’T BUY DRM-ED CONTENT!

5 Responses to Copying for personal use allowed

  1. Hmm looks like someone’s taken a common sense pill. Shame they didn’t have any at last years USA F1 GP.

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  2. What happened at last year’s USA Grand Prix?

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  3. The tyre fiasco… one of Michelin’s tyres failed (due to track problems which were known beforehand) on Schumacher Jrs Toyota, which lead to all the Michelin shod card pulling out and leaving only six cars in the race.

    http://edition.cnn.com/2005/SPORT/06/19/usa.grand/

    All got very silly….

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  4. OK, so not actually anything to do with BPI/music/DRM then 🙂 No wonder I was confused 😛

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  5. No, but the need of people taking “sensible” pills was required in order to get on, which of course didn’t happen

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