Ripper Street

It may not be a late April fool’s joke but it would make a good one- A UK Copyright Exception will come into effect this summer that will make it legal for consumers to rip music from CDs they already own for personal use.

So, regular subscribers of The Gen can finally rest easy as they burn all of those CDs to play in their CD players or back up to their cloud lockers- a practice that wasn’t previously technically legal. This despite the fact that a previous Government survey revealed that one third of people asked had previously thrown caution to the wind and recklessly burned content they had already legally purchased.

Crowds gathered in streets around the globe to celebrate the news, with one onlooker (who wished to remain anonymous) declaring it to be “A glorious day to back up music you already own and have acquired legally onto another device”.

It isn’t all fun and games though, with a guide to the new rules clearly warning that: “It will still be illegal to make copies for friends or family, or to make a copy of something you do not own or have acquired illegally, without the copyright owner’s permission. So you will not be able to make copies of CDs for your friends, to copy CDs borrowed from friends, or to copy videos illegally downloaded from file-sharing websites”.

There will also be legal changes to the ability to parody or quote from the work of others, with fears from the copyright community that this will result in a lot of user generated content riffing off existing material without paying the original owners.

Read the ‘Exception to Copyright’ guide here (link to http://www.scribd.com/doc/215022716/Copyright-Guidance-Consumers) though be warned that, according to this guide, it may only affect you if you:

• Read books, watch films or listen to music;
• Use electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, eReaders, MP3 players and computers.
• Blog, put videos on websites like YouTube, or share pictures and content with your friends.
• Breathe air.