8 ms·

Ripping music and films illegal again in UK after High Court overturns new law

49 points by merah 11y ago

hyperion2010 11y ago
Excellent, please continue to undermine communal belief in the importance and relevance of laws. Hope this works out well for you!
- keithpeter 11y ago
  Not sure I understand. We have a law that makes a large percentage if not a majority of UK adults criminals. How can that actually be taken seriously? By anyone? Can you imagine what would happen if anyone was actually prosecuted?
  - Nadya 11y ago
    Their point was that people don't respect laws when laws are as absurd as this one. It undermines peoples' beliefs that they should follow the law when: 1) It's absurd to the general population 2) It can't even be enforced >undermine communal belief in the importance and relevance of laws Laws like this undermine the common-held belief that laws are important or relevant. Because everyone breaks the law and it's not enforced - which makes the law not important and not relevant.
  - richmarr 11y ago
    My interpretation is that you agree with each other. I think @hyperion2010's point was that this interpretation of law can't be taken seriously, and by extension that if this part of law can't be taken seriously then law in general is undermined.
- vidarh 11y ago
  I have about 700 DVDs and CDs. All ripped. None of it shared anywhere. I'm now severely tempted to stop buying and start pirating, seeing as I'll be a criminal either way.
  - richmarr 11y ago
    Exactly, you've got Hobson's choice here: Pay for the content again on a new platform, or don't have the content. I think implicit in Hobson's choice is that you can knock Hobson over the head and have your pick of any damn horse you like... which is the route you're proposing.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      Well, since it's unenforceable, you can safely ignore it. The loser here is the government in that it's being slapped for failing to consider everyone's interests when drafting legislation - the ruling is not that ripping is bad, but there's no governmental mechanism for measuring or mitigating the impact on content providers. In short, it's not about you. What the court is basically telling the government to do is to assign permanent responsibility to someone in the civil service (or set up some similar mechanism) for tracking the degree of copyright infringement that occurs and compensating injured parties, who are citizens or corporations in good standing with legal rights of their own. The government can't just facilitate a practice which will foreseeably result in some injury to one group of people and then leave that group at a legal disadvantage; it creates the opposite of a level playing field by saying that some peoples' economic interests are less important than others. A lot of people make the argument that technology has changed the market, so content producers shouldn't expect to have their incomes protected, because we didn't protect the manufacture of buggy whips in response to the popularity of modern cars. But this is flawed reasoning. In a case like that, demand shifted away from horse-drawn vehicles (and their peripheral goods like buggy whips) towards mechanically-powered ones. In the case of music and movies, demand for the product has not shifted to something else - people still love to consume music, watch movies etc. What's different is that you can now frequently get the same product you wanted before, at the same level of quality, and enjoy it the same way, but without paying for it, if you are so inclined. In this case, technology hasn't altered the product itself, but rather the economic relations of product distribution. So even if you are super cutting-edge as an artist/publisher, and you decide to make high-quality, device-agnostic digital copies of your work available to consumers from day 1, you are still faced with the problem that some consumers will decide to upload it to file-sharing sites, and many others will choose to download it and subsequently enjoy it without bothering to pay anything while you watch your sales dry up. The equilibrium price asymptotically approaches zero because sellers no longer have any control over the supply curve, so all of the economic surplus goes to consumers and little or none goes to producers, who are thus disincentivized from further creation because they are no longer able to make a living as before even though demand for their product may be as strong as ever. Interestingly, when electronic music - ie recordings of electronic oscillators, filters and modulators, bleeps and bloops - first got going in the UK in the 1950s, the first creators were unable to get artistic credit because the body that administers royalties wouldn't accept the output as music or recognize a creative input, partly out of fear that mechanically produced music would destroy jobs for musicians who played conventional instruments, and in the 1980s there was a pushback from the musician's union against multi-timbral synthesizers/sequencers that could replace whole groups of musicians. Those really are anti-technology, anti-market initiatives but they ultimately went nowhere, notwithstanding that the rise in popularity of electronic music did result in some economic displacement.
keithpeter 11y ago
"It's unclear how the change will be enforced." Here we go again. The UK Government keep saying we want more high skilled jobs/technology/'digital' but we criminalise a huge percentage of the population that engage in basically harmless format shifting and render hardware start-ups[1] marginal. Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting? [1] http://www.brennan.co.uk/ http://www.brennan.co.uk/
- millak 11y ago
  To be fair, it was the government that passed a law to legalise such activity; it was the industry that challenged that law and the High Court that overturned it!
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    It's also the government that made such activity illegal in the first place through copyright law and excessively strict interpretation thereof. Without that, it wouldn't need a law to "legalise" it.
  - keithpeter 11y ago
    So other countries can frame laws that don't criminalise a large percentage of the economically active electorate. Why couldn't Call-Me-Dave? Have you got any insight/reasons?
    - millak 11y ago
      Nope.
    - jwdunne 11y ago
      Call-Me-Dave had to backtrack after making out he wanted to ban encryption and a bunch of smart computer scientists and cryptographers made him look foolish. I guess there in lies why Call-Me-Dave couldn't.
- chc 11y ago
  > Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting? Isn't that what was done, and the decision here is striking that law down? It looks like you can't frame a law that allows format shifting without paying the copyright holder of the work.
beedogs 11y ago
Precisely no one will ever be charged for ripping a CD or DVD in the UK. What a waste of everyone's time.
- richmarr 11y ago
  Maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was used to beat on companies like Brennan (who are awesome BTW, I have a JB7).
- MrZongle2 11y ago
  "Precisely no one will ever be charged for ripping a CD or DVD in the UK." I wouldn't be so sure. The U.S. Government got Al Capone on tax evasion. If it can be used as a means to further punish somebody, or the only means to punish somebody, it will be used.
batou 11y ago
Whatever. Zero fucks given. I have no physical media and never will again. Not playing these games any more. I'll continue to steal stuff. If it is good, I'll buy the mp3 or go to a gig. What about those newly defined criminals Amazon with AutoRip?
- babygoat 11y ago
  Amazon has a competent legal department.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Apparently so does The Pirate Bay.
    - babygoat 11y ago
      What are you suggesting?
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        That, as usual, a court ruling on copyright doesn't change anything for either commercial entities (Amazon) or violators of copyright (TPB).
- richmarr 11y ago
  Seems likely Amazon (and Apple, etc) are the targets of this. If they remove that feature and it causes 5% fewer CD tracks being ripped to mp3, then a few more music execs will get to look smug while clicking their associates through a ghoulish powerpoint next year.
- evo_9 11y ago
  Exactly man. I do the same thing. If you really want to help music artists in particular, attend their shows, they make most of their money off gate. Also, buy a copy or two of their albums, and whatever else they have. All that money goes right to the band. I always buy a CD and vinyl (if they have it) and then give away the CD if I already have more than one copy.
vermooten 11y ago
ahahahahaa the music industry sometimes reminds me of creationists, blind to reality It's like 2002 all over again
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
  Lots of people, including us, are blind to reality. It seems there is no escape. So laugh at <silly group of people> all you want. You are only laughing at yourself. Edit: Lawfully purchased monty python DVDs doubly support this point of view.
greg5green 11y ago
I want to support artists and stuff, but the music industry is making it so hard for me to do that in good conscience with their anti-consumer stances.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  No they're not. They're making it hard for the government to postpone addressing the fundamental economic changes imposed by zero marginal-cost distribution. Since entertainment media production is a substantial chunk of the UK economy at about £65 billion a year, it's not unreasonable to ask government to come up with a policy on it. Entertainment is cultural capital, and it brings in both direct revenue and indirect (eg tourism). So the industry is saying 'you're going to allow something that you know will facilitate copyright infringement and thus destroy sales, what is your policy to ensure that the creative people don't end bearing all the economic loss?' The answer might be a change in copyright rules, a tax on entertainment media (probably a bad idea) some sort subsidy for people who work in the arts (like France), favorable tax treatment for people who work in the arts (like Ireland, where artists are exempt from paying income taxes - yes really), or whatever. As I have explained over and over again here on HN, changes in the marginal cost of distribution have no bearing on the cost of creation, ie making the original work. People still want to consume music, movies, books etc. as much as they ever did, and it takes creative people just as much effort to create such works as it always did, but the value of their property right has been eroded by forces outside their control or competence. So anyone who makes intellectual property is stuck with a completely different economic calculus from anyone engaged in creating physical property, and the government has so far failed to address this.
  - Oletros 11y ago
    > So the industry is saying 'you're going to allow something that you know will facilitate copyright infringement and thus destroy sales What? And this is why the media industry is seeing as anti consumers.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
gjm11 11y ago
The actual judgement: http://www.ukmusic.org/assets/general/APPROVED_JUDGMENT_BASCA_second_hearing.pdf http://www.ukmusic.org/assets/general/APPROVED_JUDGMENT_BASC... But most of the meat is in this earlier one: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/basca-v-sofs-bis-judgment.pdf https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/basc... The main claim made by the music industry in this case was that when the law was introduced no provision was made to compensate copyright holders for the harm it would (allegedly) do them, and that the government failed to demonstrate that it had adequate evidence for claiming that it didn't need to because no substantial harm was done. (Apparently there is some requirement, when the government brings in a new law, that those non-negligibly harmed by it should be compensated. I do not know the details. I would be interested to know on what occasions if any they've actually done this. I've certainly never heard, e.g., of anyone being recompensed because the government has introduced a new tax on the sale of an asset they hold a lot of -- but that might be quite a different situation because it doesn't exactly involve new laws.) The judge, to be clear, didn't find that there is substantial harm. Only that the government hadn't adequately established that there isn't. This was a purely procedural matter. The music industry made a bunch of other claims, on which the judge found in favour of the government. For instance, when assessing the harm done to copyright holders, the government essentially asked the question: would they actually sell fewer copies with a limited-private-use exemption in law than without? The music industry contended that instead "harm" should be measured by assuming that every copy taken is a sale lost. Unsurprisingly, the judge agreed with the government on this. So it seems at least possible that the government may go away, lick its wounds, come up with a bigger pile of better evidence that a law of this kind will not in fact make any substantial difference to the music industry's profits, and then pass pretty much the exact same law again. I do hope so. Or they might come up with a smaller easier-to-marshal body of evidence that the harm is really rather small, and pass a similar law that does compensate the music industry just a little. I fear that actually they'll just drop the issue, though, and leave us with a stupid restriction that most of the population ignores and that no one is realistically going to be able to use to prosecute anyone anyhow.
- kuschku 11y ago
  In Germany, we just pay a fee on new media (SSDs, thumbdrives, phones, HDDs, blank CDs and DVDs, etc) which is given to the record companies and shared between the content creators.
aczerepinski 11y ago
More than anything else, I'm surprised to see that anyone still cares about CDs and DVDs.
- vidarh 11y ago
  I like having a physical copy of things I really like and want to keep long term. More-so for movies, where the alternative has typically been DRM infested, than for music. But everything gets ripped the instant I get it into my house.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
    Buy a NAS. It can be your physical copy of everything.
ommunist 11y ago
Yup. That may kill Brennan's business.
yason 11y ago
So, now that the masses have been (criminally) copying music and films into their computers roughly for a couple of decades and we've maybe ten years ago passed the point where music (and mostly films, too) are basically unconsumable unless they're in digital format, these people actually make a focused effort to shoot down a law that legalises this widely de facto usage, just to get back to the same old reality with a completely unenforceable situation that nobody cares about——based on the lack of court action, not even themselves? They might see it as some sort of a moral victory but I had no idea they were so utterly out of touch with reality, for real.

49 points by merah 11y ago

hyperion2010 11y ago

Excellent, please continue to undermine communal belief in the importance and relevance of laws. Hope this works out well for you!

keithpeter 11y ago
Not sure I understand. We have a law that makes a large percentage if not a majority of UK adults criminals. How can that actually be taken seriously? By anyone? Can you imagine what would happen if anyone was actually prosecuted?
- Nadya 11y ago
  Their point was that people don't respect laws when laws are as absurd as this one. It undermines peoples' beliefs that they should follow the law when: 1) It's absurd to the general population 2) It can't even be enforced >undermine communal belief in the importance and relevance of laws Laws like this undermine the common-held belief that laws are important or relevant. Because everyone breaks the law and it's not enforced - which makes the law not important and not relevant.
- richmarr 11y ago
  My interpretation is that you agree with each other. I think @hyperion2010's point was that this interpretation of law can't be taken seriously, and by extension that if this part of law can't be taken seriously then law in general is undermined.
vidarh 11y ago
I have about 700 DVDs and CDs. All ripped. None of it shared anywhere. I'm now severely tempted to stop buying and start pirating, seeing as I'll be a criminal either way.
- richmarr 11y ago
  Exactly, you've got Hobson's choice here: Pay for the content again on a new platform, or don't have the content. I think implicit in Hobson's choice is that you can knock Hobson over the head and have your pick of any damn horse you like... which is the route you're proposing.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    Well, since it's unenforceable, you can safely ignore it. The loser here is the government in that it's being slapped for failing to consider everyone's interests when drafting legislation - the ruling is not that ripping is bad, but there's no governmental mechanism for measuring or mitigating the impact on content providers. In short, it's not about you. What the court is basically telling the government to do is to assign permanent responsibility to someone in the civil service (or set up some similar mechanism) for tracking the degree of copyright infringement that occurs and compensating injured parties, who are citizens or corporations in good standing with legal rights of their own. The government can't just facilitate a practice which will foreseeably result in some injury to one group of people and then leave that group at a legal disadvantage; it creates the opposite of a level playing field by saying that some peoples' economic interests are less important than others. A lot of people make the argument that technology has changed the market, so content producers shouldn't expect to have their incomes protected, because we didn't protect the manufacture of buggy whips in response to the popularity of modern cars. But this is flawed reasoning. In a case like that, demand shifted away from horse-drawn vehicles (and their peripheral goods like buggy whips) towards mechanically-powered ones. In the case of music and movies, demand for the product has not shifted to something else - people still love to consume music, watch movies etc. What's different is that you can now frequently get the same product you wanted before, at the same level of quality, and enjoy it the same way, but without paying for it, if you are so inclined. In this case, technology hasn't altered the product itself, but rather the economic relations of product distribution. So even if you are super cutting-edge as an artist/publisher, and you decide to make high-quality, device-agnostic digital copies of your work available to consumers from day 1, you are still faced with the problem that some consumers will decide to upload it to file-sharing sites, and many others will choose to download it and subsequently enjoy it without bothering to pay anything while you watch your sales dry up. The equilibrium price asymptotically approaches zero because sellers no longer have any control over the supply curve, so all of the economic surplus goes to consumers and little or none goes to producers, who are thus disincentivized from further creation because they are no longer able to make a living as before even though demand for their product may be as strong as ever. Interestingly, when electronic music - ie recordings of electronic oscillators, filters and modulators, bleeps and bloops - first got going in the UK in the 1950s, the first creators were unable to get artistic credit because the body that administers royalties wouldn't accept the output as music or recognize a creative input, partly out of fear that mechanically produced music would destroy jobs for musicians who played conventional instruments, and in the 1980s there was a pushback from the musician's union against multi-timbral synthesizers/sequencers that could replace whole groups of musicians. Those really are anti-technology, anti-market initiatives but they ultimately went nowhere, notwithstanding that the rise in popularity of electronic music did result in some economic displacement.

keithpeter 11y ago

"It's unclear how the change will be enforced." Here we go again. The UK Government keep saying we want more high skilled jobs/technology/'digital' but we criminalise a huge percentage of the population that engage in basically harmless format shifting and render hardware start-ups[1] marginal. Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting? [1] http://www.brennan.co.uk/ http://www.brennan.co.uk/

millak 11y ago
To be fair, it was the government that passed a law to legalise such activity; it was the industry that challenged that law and the High Court that overturned it!
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  It's also the government that made such activity illegal in the first place through copyright law and excessively strict interpretation thereof. Without that, it wouldn't need a law to "legalise" it.
- keithpeter 11y ago
  So other countries can frame laws that don't criminalise a large percentage of the economically active electorate. Why couldn't Call-Me-Dave? Have you got any insight/reasons?
  - millak 11y ago
    Nope.
  - jwdunne 11y ago
    Call-Me-Dave had to backtrack after making out he wanted to ban encryption and a bunch of smart computer scientists and cryptographers made him look foolish. I guess there in lies why Call-Me-Dave couldn't.
chc 11y ago
> Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting? Isn't that what was done, and the decision here is striking that law down? It looks like you can't frame a law that allows format shifting without paying the copyright holder of the work.

beedogs 11y ago

Precisely no one will ever be charged for ripping a CD or DVD in the UK. What a waste of everyone's time.

richmarr 11y ago
Maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was used to beat on companies like Brennan (who are awesome BTW, I have a JB7).
MrZongle2 11y ago
"Precisely no one will ever be charged for ripping a CD or DVD in the UK." I wouldn't be so sure. The U.S. Government got Al Capone on tax evasion. If it can be used as a means to further punish somebody, or the only means to punish somebody, it will be used.

batou 11y ago

Whatever. Zero fucks given. I have no physical media and never will again. Not playing these games any more. I'll continue to steal stuff. If it is good, I'll buy the mp3 or go to a gig. What about those newly defined criminals Amazon with AutoRip?

babygoat 11y ago
Amazon has a competent legal department.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Apparently so does The Pirate Bay.
  - babygoat 11y ago
    What are you suggesting?
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      That, as usual, a court ruling on copyright doesn't change anything for either commercial entities (Amazon) or violators of copyright (TPB).
richmarr 11y ago
Seems likely Amazon (and Apple, etc) are the targets of this. If they remove that feature and it causes 5% fewer CD tracks being ripped to mp3, then a few more music execs will get to look smug while clicking their associates through a ghoulish powerpoint next year.
evo_9 11y ago
Exactly man. I do the same thing. If you really want to help music artists in particular, attend their shows, they make most of their money off gate. Also, buy a copy or two of their albums, and whatever else they have. All that money goes right to the band. I always buy a CD and vinyl (if they have it) and then give away the CD if I already have more than one copy.

vermooten 11y ago

ahahahahaa the music industry sometimes reminds me of creationists, blind to reality It's like 2002 all over again

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
Lots of people, including us, are blind to reality. It seems there is no escape. So laugh at <silly group of people> all you want. You are only laughing at yourself. Edit: Lawfully purchased monty python DVDs doubly support this point of view.

greg5green 11y ago

I want to support artists and stuff, but the music industry is making it so hard for me to do that in good conscience with their anti-consumer stances.

anigbrowl 11y ago
No they're not. They're making it hard for the government to postpone addressing the fundamental economic changes imposed by zero marginal-cost distribution. Since entertainment media production is a substantial chunk of the UK economy at about £65 billion a year, it's not unreasonable to ask government to come up with a policy on it. Entertainment is cultural capital, and it brings in both direct revenue and indirect (eg tourism). So the industry is saying 'you're going to allow something that you know will facilitate copyright infringement and thus destroy sales, what is your policy to ensure that the creative people don't end bearing all the economic loss?' The answer might be a change in copyright rules, a tax on entertainment media (probably a bad idea) some sort subsidy for people who work in the arts (like France), favorable tax treatment for people who work in the arts (like Ireland, where artists are exempt from paying income taxes - yes really), or whatever. As I have explained over and over again here on HN, changes in the marginal cost of distribution have no bearing on the cost of creation, ie making the original work. People still want to consume music, movies, books etc. as much as they ever did, and it takes creative people just as much effort to create such works as it always did, but the value of their property right has been eroded by forces outside their control or competence. So anyone who makes intellectual property is stuck with a completely different economic calculus from anyone engaged in creating physical property, and the government has so far failed to address this.
- Oletros 11y ago
  > So the industry is saying 'you're going to allow something that you know will facilitate copyright infringement and thus destroy sales What? And this is why the media industry is seeing as anti consumers.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago

gjm11 11y ago

The actual judgement: http://www.ukmusic.org/assets/general/APPROVED_JUDGMENT_BASCA_second_hearing.pdf http://www.ukmusic.org/assets/general/APPROVED_JUDGMENT_BASC... But most of the meat is in this earlier one: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/basca-v-sofs-bis-judgment.pdf https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/basc... The main claim made by the music industry in this case was that when the law was introduced no provision was made to compensate copyright holders for the harm it would (allegedly) do them, and that the government failed to demonstrate that it had adequate evidence for claiming that it didn't need to because no substantial harm was done. (Apparently there is some requirement, when the government brings in a new law, that those non-negligibly harmed by it should be compensated. I do not know the details. I would be interested to know on what occasions if any they've actually done this. I've certainly never heard, e.g., of anyone being recompensed because the government has introduced a new tax on the sale of an asset they hold a lot of -- but that might be quite a different situation because it doesn't exactly involve new laws.) The judge, to be clear, didn't find that there is substantial harm. Only that the government hadn't adequately established that there isn't. This was a purely procedural matter. The music industry made a bunch of other claims, on which the judge found in favour of the government. For instance, when assessing the harm done to copyright holders, the government essentially asked the question: would they actually sell fewer copies with a limited-private-use exemption in law than without? The music industry contended that instead "harm" should be measured by assuming that every copy taken is a sale lost. Unsurprisingly, the judge agreed with the government on this. So it seems at least possible that the government may go away, lick its wounds, come up with a bigger pile of better evidence that a law of this kind will not in fact make any substantial difference to the music industry's profits, and then pass pretty much the exact same law again. I do hope so. Or they might come up with a smaller easier-to-marshal body of evidence that the harm is really rather small, and pass a similar law that does compensate the music industry just a little. I fear that actually they'll just drop the issue, though, and leave us with a stupid restriction that most of the population ignores and that no one is realistically going to be able to use to prosecute anyone anyhow.

kuschku 11y ago
In Germany, we just pay a fee on new media (SSDs, thumbdrives, phones, HDDs, blank CDs and DVDs, etc) which is given to the record companies and shared between the content creators.

aczerepinski 11y ago

More than anything else, I'm surprised to see that anyone still cares about CDs and DVDs.

vidarh 11y ago
I like having a physical copy of things I really like and want to keep long term. More-so for movies, where the alternative has typically been DRM infested, than for music. But everything gets ripped the instant I get it into my house.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
  Buy a NAS. It can be your physical copy of everything.

ommunist 11y ago

Yup. That may kill Brennan's business.

yason 11y ago

So, now that the masses have been (criminally) copying music and films into their computers roughly for a couple of decades and we've maybe ten years ago passed the point where music (and mostly films, too) are basically unconsumable unless they're in digital format, these people actually make a focused effort to shoot down a law that legalises this widely de facto usage, just to get back to the same old reality with a completely unenforceable situation that nobody cares about——based on the lack of court action, not even themselves? They might see it as some sort of a moral victory but I had no idea they were so utterly out of touch with reality, for real.