I’ve been meaning to write about this one for a while as the annoyance has been festering, so I’ll get it off my chest now; according to aunty, British music fans are infringing copyright on a wholesale basis:
More than half of British consumers are infringing copyright law by copying CDs onto other players they own, according to the National Consumer Council (NCC).
In an online poll of 2,135 UK adults conducted by YouGov, 55% said they copied CDs onto computers, iPods, MP3 players and other equipment.
Three in five of those questioned – 59% – thought it was legal to do so.
This comes as no surprise as it is nothing new. Those of us who bought vinyl albums will doubtless recall the hideous “home taping is killing music” warnings stuck to the front of the album cover or printed on the inner sleeve. It didn’t kill music of course and we all did it. Did that make us evil people stealing bread from the mouths of musicians’ children? Of course not. If you had a car with a cassette player, you could not play your music unless it was on a Phillips cassette (I’m not going to get into eight track). Now, having bought the vinyl album, it was a simple matter to copy it onto a blank tape and play it in the car. Doing so was breach of copyright, hence the dire warnings of death and destruction in the music industry. However, I carried on doing it for a perfectly valid reason – I had paid for the music already. I was not going to pay again to play something I had already paid for the rights to play just because the medium it came on was inconvenient. I wasn’t paying for the medium, I was paying for the rights to the music – to play it on my own equipment for my own entertainment. In taping it all I was doing was extending the range of options for playing it for my own entertainment. I was not playing it to an audience, I was not reselling it and I was not depriving the music industry of reasonable royalties (although, doubtless, they would dispute that). Yet, the industry wanted me to pay twice for the same piece of music. This was not reasonable, so I didn’t comply.
Twenty years on and they are still at it. Funny, I’d have thought all that home taping would have killed off music by now and all those aging rock stars would be in the poor house living on stale bread and gruel. Now, the hard-done-by bleating is about people having the temerity to copy CDs that they have paid for onto MP3 players so that they can listen to the music that they have paid for when on the move. Nothing changes. Well, apart from the vicious and vengeful behaviour of the music industry, which, rather than actively embrace modern needs and technology prefers to slam huge fines on children.
I don’t have a problem with the principle of copyright – I’ve been the victim of copyright theft myself. Only yesterday I saw one of my graphics being passed off on another website without acknowledgement or permission. However, when someone sells the rights to piece of work, they should do so once and once only. To demand a repeat payment for the privilege of a different medium is blatant greed.
The NCC said their findings showed the law is out of step with modern life and discriminated against consumers.
“We need to shake up the copyright law to incorporate the right to copy for private use,” said the NCC’s Jill Johnstone.
Indeed, it was twenty years ago, so it certainly is now. In the meantime, if I want to backup my CDs and DVDs I will do so regardless of the music industry’s attitude to copyright. If I want to listen to my latest album on my MP3 payer or the computer, I will copy it with impunity – and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay all over again. Unless it changes its behaviour, the industry will alienate the music buying public; its bread and butter customers.
If the law is either wrong or badly interpreted, then people will ignore it, which is what is happening here. The other possibility is that music buyers will decide that the greed ridden industry doesn’t need their money and will stop buying the product until the industry starts to behave in a more realistic and reasonable manner. Certainly, I buy less music than I did and feel no sympathy whatsoever for those aging rock stars having to manage on gruel and stale bread. :dry: