* CD ripping legalized; scraps plan to block illegal filesharing websites
* Accepts Hargreaves recommendations
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MUMBAI: UK business secretary Vince Cable has declared that the government will accept all 10 recommendations made in the Hargreaves review, prompting the biggest shake-ups in UK intellectual property law in years.
The government is focused on boosting growth and the Hargreaves review highlighted the potential to grow the UK economy,” Cable said, “By creating a more open intellectual property system it will allow innovative businesses to develop new products and services which will be able to compete fairly in the UK’s thriving markets for consumer equipment. We are accepting the [Hargreaves] recommendations and will now set about reforming the UK’s intellectual property systems. Opening up intellectual property laws can deliver real value to the UK economy as well as the creators and consumers….
Previously, the act of limited private copying – to shift the format of a music track from an inconvenient physical CD to an MP3 that can be placed on portable media player or smartphone, for example – was, technically, illegal under the Copyright Act. While unenforced – to the point where Apple was able to get away with the slogan ‘Rip, Mix, Burn’ for several advertising campaigns – it left those users wanting to make use of their new digital music players in a legal grey area.
The new exemption will change the law so that it is in line with consumer expectations, and reflects the real-world use of such devices. How broad the exemption will be – and whether it will cover the uploading of such copied content to cloud-based services like Apple’s iCloud – is not yet known.
The rules will particularly benefit comedy producers, offering freedom similar to that available in the US, where shows such as Saturday Night Live are allowed to spoof copyrighted works.
It is also making it legal for consumers to copy purchased content across devices, such as ripping songs from a CD to a computer, bringing the law into line with “the real world”.
The reforms will also see copying for the purposes of parody – a protected use in the US, but not in the UK – legitimised, a nod to the requests that the UK implement a broader ‘fair use’ law for the re-use of copyright content without permission in selected scenarios.
Not all of the recommendations reflect relaxed approaches to intellectual property, however. The government has also announced that it is issuing a new Intellectual Property Crime Strategy which details how domestic enforcement of IP theft will be carried out.
That trade in intellectual property will be helped by the founding of a Digital Copyright Exchange, a market place where licences for copyright content can be bought and sold. It’s a move which it is believed could add up to ?2 billion a year to the UK economy by 2012, and one which represents a large chunk of the alleged ?7.9 billion ‘potential benefit’ that the reforms bring.
At the same time, the next steps in efforts to curb illegal online file sharing, an issue tackled by the 2010 Digital Economy Act, are being introduced.
The government said it is going ahead with a “mass notification system” that will send warning letters to “educate” people who have used their internet connection to illegally share content, pointing them to legal alternatives.
Anyone appealing against a detected instance of file sharing will have to pay a ?20 fee, in an effort to deter “vexatious appeals from people determined to disrupt the system,” the government said.
However, plans to give courts the power to block sites “dedicated to copyright” have been dropped, after media regulator Ofcom said the proposals, contained in the Digital Economy Act, would not work in practice.
This comes despite a UK High Court ruling last week that forced telco BT to block access to filesharing site Newzbin2, following legal action by the Motion Picture Association of America.
