UK copyright tweak in June will finally allow ripping of CDs

Three years after copyright review recommended changes to the law to allow format-shifting for CDs and ebooks, the 1988 law will get an update to allow it

The 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act was passed in the same year as Prince's Lovesexy album was released.

Fifteen years after the first MP3 players went on sale in the UK, it will soon be legal to copy music you've bought on to them from a CD you own.

Updates to the UK's copyright laws mean that from June, "ripping" CDs and putting them on to portable players like Apple's iPod will no longer be against the strict letter of the law.

But it doesn't appear to allow people to create digital backups of DVDs - unless they can show that the copyright protection being used on them is "too restrictive" in a complaint to the secretary of state, a position presently held by Maria Miller.

"The law [on exceptions] is changing in a number of small but important ways, to make our copyright system better suited to the digital age," the UK's Intellectual Property Office says in a new advisory (PDF). "These changes will affect how you can use content like books, music, films and photographs."

Under the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, it is not in fact legal to transform a piece of copyrighted content from one storage form to another - so turning a CD, which is encoded in one method, into a file formatted as MP3 or Windows Media Audio or AAC and storing it on a computer hard drive or digital music player is, strictly, against the law.

Record labels have known about this for years - but have turned a blind eye, because prosecuting everyone who bought a music player or transferred files to their phone would be both ruinously expensive and terrible publicity.

But, the IPO guidance points out, "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."

In a Q&A section, it points out that making copies of content "for family at home" is already illegal - and that there are no plans to change it.

If you give away or sell a CD that you have backed up, you'll have to destroy the backup copy to stay within the law, the guidance notes.

The law is also changing to allow quotations to be taken from works and used in others for purposes other than "criticism, review or news reporting", previously the only justifications allowed for using them. The growing use of quotations from works on blogs and other formats has driven a shift under which their use will be legal as long as the quote is not excessively long – known as "fair dealing".

Precisely how much or little constitutes "fair dealing" is determined by courts on a case-by-case basis because it varies so widely: using three lines of an eight-line poem might arguably cross the line, but the use of three lines from a 10,000 page book would be unlikely to.

The changes follow the Hargreaves review, which reported to the government in May 2011, recommending the tweaks to copyright law and noting that the law "has started to act as a regulatory barrier to the creation of certain kinds of new, internet-based businesses".

The EU had already sanctioned such format-shifting, Hargreaves noted, and yet the UK government had not taken advantage of them, even though they would bring "important cultural as well as economic benefits to the UK".

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