http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10776.asp

and just in case the UK proposed law is not enough then there is always EU copy directive law.

cyberscan comments
“Am I a thief for having a radio on in a waiting room…”

The music industry says that doing it is ilegal. They say you need their license. But their license is actualy useless fraud because it is for a repertoire of specific named songs (A SMALL FRACTION OF ALL OSSIBLE SONGS) but you have no way of knowing if the songs that are on the radio are the songs covered by your license. You would need to know in advance which songs are to be performed in advance and what songs are in the licensed repertoire so as to shut off the radio when non licensed (to you) songs are played. In essense the waiting room-radio-performance license is a scam when applied to most, if not all, public places.

The same is for performance by artists and bands in clubs. The artists and bands have no way of determining if a song requested by a cusomer is currently (it may have been last week but not today) on the licensed repertoire, basically a (hidden) list of songs never given to the licencees.

As to the issue of copying a CD for personal use being a crime, then each time someone pushes the copy button on a photocopier or a radio-cassetted recorder, or use cut and paste on a computer or inserts a blank CD on a CD burner a crime is being comitted by you, with a bunch of government agencies and corporations as co-conspitators to the extent they profit or benefit from your criminal activity.

Maybe breathing is a crime too?

Sterling Ball, a jovial, plain-talking businessman, is CEO of Ernie Ball, the world’s leading maker of premium guitar strings endorsed by generations of artists ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to the dudes from Metallica. But since jettisoning all of Microsoft products three years ago, Ernie Ball has also gained notoriety as a company that dumped most of its proprietary software–and still lived to tell the tale. In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs. Ball settled for $65,000, plus $35,000 in legal fees. But by then, the BSA, a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing provisions for major business software makers, had put the company on the evening news and featured it in regional ads warning other businesses to monitor their software licenses. Humiliated by the experience, Ball told his IT department he wanted Microsoft products out of his business within six months. “I said, ‘I don’t care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses,’” recalled Ball, who recently addressed the LinuxWorld trade show. “We won’t do business with someone who treats us poorly.” What happened to him and his views of the people that did it to hi8m are exactly the same as many who are fed up with how the entertainment cartels treat their customers.

Many of my fellow software authors say that people cannot make money by giving away ownership of code. I beg to differ. I make a pretty good living doing exactly this. I go into a business which has an antiquated phone system and demonstrate how much money that company can save by installing a VOIP phone system. I then get a used laptop computer, a VOIP FXS gateway, and a few inexpensive IP phones from off the net. I cobble and hack these things together and make a really nice phone system that routes long distance calls over the Internet while using their current POTS system for local calls. The companies usually pay a maximum 2 cents a minute for outgoing long distance calls (with no connection fees or exorbitant taxes). My system does much more as well. It filters out unwanted calls and also guards the building at night. I glued this system together using Linux, Asterisk, and about a hundred or so lines of code. I spent two days setting the first system up, and I made $200. I can now use and recycle my code and do a much faster job. In many cases I set up a system that allows a company to keep its current phone system

Yes, those who produce intellectual products such as music, movies and code need to realize that they are like any other business. They have to sell their products or service at a price customers are willing to pay, or else the customers will go to someone else who will. The movie, software, and music cartels are beginning to find this out, and with modern day licensing such as the GPL, Creative Commons, and most importantly, the Net, there is real competition. These companies have to compete on a level playing field with EVERYONE else who wants to play, and there is not a damned thing they can do about it.

There is a law called fair use, the industry hates it, but it IS a law. It states you can make one legal backup copy of a CD product you own.

No matter WHAT Sony says, they are wrong. Ripping a CD is NOT illegal and would not hold up in a court of law…and what is worse? They know it!

People who rip their own CDs are like the musical Gandhis of our time. Civil disobedience may be the best way to counter the RIAA…and when you’ve got a huge percentage of the population engaging in P2P file sharing of files, illegally or otherwise, in an artificial oligopoly production and distribution system that is morally and ethically defunct to the core, it’s pretty hard to avoid the train wreck ahead for the RIAA.

Most of the younger generation doesn’t care that much about music anymore. They would rather game as another form of entertainment. The ones that were buying have pretty much ceased as well from the older generation. They have in the past gotten all they are pretty much gonna get. You can’t keep repackaging the same stuff forever. Sooner or later everyone has what they want. That leaves just the “now” generation and they don’t see the value in the product as it is.

As for the trolls that keep spouting the industry line, it is the industry itself responcible for the collapse of the music support side. By deciding to do away with the cd and transfer everything to digital, they are the ones directly responcible for cutting out the artists that make the covers, the truck drivers that moved the product to and from the warehouse, the warehouse employees, the mom and pop record stores, and the employees themselves that worked there. All because the majors wanted that money themselves.

It sort of backfired on them though. As cd sales decline, the chains will give less floor space to those products not selling as well, forcing yet another drop in the decline which will spiral down into near nothing. No one is going to sink a lot of money into blu-ray nor HD as no format has been decided as the winner. It also means that those that would consider DVD are having second thoughts as no one wants to get stuck with a dead format, resulting in yet another decline for the DVD starting the spiralling process.

The digitals are so over compressed they have pretty much killed the audiophile for which digitals hold no attraction. They always wanted purity of sound. Something drastically cut and missing from the digital. So again bad decisions have resulted in the most common player being the cheap one that you can not hear the minor missing parts on. So no one wants to pay the high prices anymore. It is just not seen as worth it anymore.

Wait…What was that I heard? Sounded like the passing of a meteorite. We should all be making a joyful noise!