from the its-now-legal-to-do-what-we've-been-doing-for-years! dept.
The last hurdle for format shifting and parody in the UK has been cleared after passing through the House of Lords.
The Open Rights Group reports:
The proposed reforms are quite modest. Despite protestations from industry about the potential impacts of the new parody exception, the law has very strong constraints. It is framed as a fair dealing exception, meaning that by definition it will only be acceptable if it has no negative impact on the revenues generated by the original. In addition, the exception does not affect any moral rights the author may claim, for example around derogatory treatment.
The new private copying exception is also relatively modest, although again a very significant step forward for the UK.
The exception is limited to personal use of lawfully obtained originals, and does not allow any sharing of the works, including with close family members. It also does not allow for the removal of any anti-copy technical protection measures, including those found on most DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. Given most media consumption is moving to a pure digital environment constrained by such measures, it remains to be seen how effective the new right will be in practice. How many people will be ripping CDs in ten years time?
Copyright law has a mechanism which allows you to ask the government to force the removal of excessive anti-copy measures when they inhibit your rights, but it will take a considerable fight to see this applied to private copying. At this point we don't know the legal arguments that rights holders or the government might apply to resist requests.
Thankfully, the exception allows people to keep copies stored in personal cloud services. This has caused major consternation among rights holders, meaning industry bodies not creators, who were probably hoping to be able to impose a tax on cloud services.
Like many industry lobby groups, the copyright lobby groups confuse profits and control with their strategic interests. A public interest copyright policy serves everyone's interests, by balancing the rights of copyright holders to profit from their work with the rights of citizens to freedom of expression and access to information and culture. These exceptions are a step towards a system that reflects that, and we should be proud that we helped copyright move in the right direction.
(Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Thursday July 31 2014, @12:07AM
This strikes me as somewhat of a hollow victory. Format shifting is quickly becoming a bygone thing, and while personal copying to different devices is long overdue in any sensible copyright law, it still doesn't answer the question of whether we actually *own* what we're purchasing.
I'm drifting well off topic here, but if you consider DRM and the inability to resell what we've purchased, it strikes me that what the copyright lobby as always wanted, a licencing model, is well underway. There was also a court decision [techdirt.com] in the UK recently that determined that 'electronic information' wasn't property. Whether this scales to the field of digital media, I'm not entirely sure.
I've waxed lyrical on the green site at times about how this new trend, most of all Steam, is destructive to our rights, as it essentially turns what used to be an ownership model into a licensing model, with heavy DRM to enforce it. Now with PC games we have an ecosystem where pricing is determined solely by the publisher and Valve - there can be no other market for them (like finding an old game for $1 at a yard sale). You pay their due, or nothing at all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Thursday July 31 2014, @01:39AM
yes, we live in a post scarcity age. There is more media than any human can possibly experience, and it gets worse every day.
Their only method seems to be articial scarcity (i.e. charge $20 for a CD when it first comes out) or keep rehashing old stuff and churning out "new but bland" stuff.
I dunno, makes you wonder when bands like Oasis spent 10 years in a basement practicing Beatles songs before they got their break. Now we have the "famous for 10 minute crowd". As a counter point, look at Pharell, the guy is in his 2nd decade behind the scenes...
Let's face it, its all about control. That's why live music rocks, because its there and then its not, and often it is unpredictable....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2014, @10:06PM
I prefer recorded studio music from 'big record labels' for the simple fact it was created and recorded TO SELL.
If it has sufficent artistry, the A&R people at the label will let it be released and the buying public will
buy it if it is TRULY good.
The A&R people usually pick out the best tunes/tracks in order to get you to buy the full album for just
those track(s). Sometimes(most of the times?) those tracks are the artist's signature tune(s) that are never,
ever surpassed.
Live pop music concerts are entertainment vehicles where the music itself is of secondary importance.
Sometimes, a live performance of music is DEFINITIVE as was the case for Peter Frampton's FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE! (1976).
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday July 31 2014, @05:50AM
"At this point we don't know the legal arguments that rights holders or the government might apply to resist requests"
Yes, we do. The legal argument is "You can buy a copy in the format that supports device X."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mojo chan on Thursday July 31 2014, @07:28AM
If a parody is not allowed to cause the original to lose any sales it's hard to see how this law is very useful.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Thursday July 31 2014, @06:33PM
If anything, I would expect a good and funny parody to increase sales of the original.
I don't think MAD Magazine ever hurt the bottom line of movies or TV shows. (Well, except their own.)
And I've certainly found a couple of artists I like through hearing parodies of their stuff on the Dr. Demento Show.
(Actually, this makes me wonder. Was Mad Magazine not legal in the UK before this?)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by PReDiToR on Thursday July 31 2014, @02:38PM
I wonder if they're going to take the extra tax off media labelled as music now?
In some ways it doesn't matter a bit, we all used to tape (format shift to audio cassette) our LPs (large flat sheets of usually black vinyl) to save wear and tear on the originals without a thought of the legalities of the act.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger.