European Court Strikes Down Law Allowing Users to Rip Their Own CDs
eff.org
eff.org
> THE QUEEN on the application of
> (1) BRITISH ACADEMY OF SONGWRITERS, COMPOSERS AND AUTHORS
> (2) MUSICIANS’ UNION
> (3) UK MUSIC 2009 LIMITED
There's a time and a place for spite, and this is it.
But if you're looking for something with teeth, this probably won't meet your needs -- as they say, "It is not copyright-based, it is entirely shame-based."
Right now, in Austria, the government is up to demand 6% of the price of any digital storage device, to compensate copyright holders when the legit consumers of their work execute their right to make a private copy.
So the European Court apparently just has settled that in one country of the EU, consumers do not have the right to make private copies, while in others consumers just got a new tax to do so. AFAIK the Austrian model follows German legislative.
What a mess.
The government's choices are now to remove the private copying exception—making personal copying illegal again, or to supply additional evidence that copyright owners suffer no or minimal “harm” from personal copying, or else to begin imposing a new tax on users to compensate the industry for that “harm”.
Which sounds to me like UK has the option to start collecting a similar surcharge to compensate for the right to make private copies of works. They are not required to ban private copying completely.
In Germany there's the issue of GEMA and the draconian policies. Also users of bittorrent are fined liberally
The directive exists pursuant to action of the European Parliament* which is also a democratic institution, as someone with Jeremy Malcolm's outstanding education is surely aware.
* http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...
I'm not expressing an opinion on the merits of European copyright law; I'm not familiar with this case or the details of EU regulations, and I'm not suggesting the EFF is wrong to oppose this provision of EU law. I just get irritated as a citizen of the EU when people dismiss anything that comes out of Brussels as 'undemocractic'. Why does the EFF keep pandering to lowest common denominator like this? If I want xenophobic arguments I'll buy a tabloid newspaper.
That, and a very long track record of such sentiments being aired by those who are more transparently xenophobic. I don't see how it is ridiculous.
Well, now I've heard it all.
It's tons of bureaucracy with very little democracy.
The EU has about 33 thousand employees, this is hardly tons of bureaucracy, just UK local government has 2.3 million employees.
Most of that isn't what people think when they hear bureaucracy.
Ed: And there's much of the reason for the bad rep of the EU inside of the EU. The rest (mostly in the UK) is due to Murdoch's personal interests, obviously.
A recent poll in the US shows that 65% of likely U.S voters think that their country is going in the wrong direction (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood...). And that doesn't even speak of the almost 50% of people who don't vote.
What is special about the EU is that national politicians and tabloid media love to use it as a scapegoat for everything that is wrong with our modern globalised world. That is especially true for the UK.
A few examples do show a blatant lack of democracy, though. In France, we had a referendum regarding the new European constitution. We refused it at 60% (not counting abstention, which by the way was relatively low). Then a dozen months later, the same constitution came back (sections were shuffled around, but it was mostly a copy-paste job). No referendum this time. It was submitted to the parliament instead. They said yes, despite indisputable evidence that the people did not want this. This is as undemocratic as it gets.
Elections don't make a country democratic. We need much stronger guarantees.
The problem was holding the referendum in the first place. Direct democracy does not work because it's a recipe for paralysis.
It's much easier to form a consensus when your constituents are all affluent. It's much easier to govern a small country than a big one.
Switzerland clearly works moderately well, but the barrier for success was far lower than for France.
Then what about making small countries? We could then federate the result. Let the small regions take care of what can be handled locally, and let the federation take care about the big stuff (army, foreign policy…).
When the government makes a decision that contradicts the will of the people, it is not democratic. Period. If the people really held the power, that decision wouldn't have been made in the first place.
The way the government was appointed doesn't matter, once you know of its actual decisions. Being democratically elected doesn't magically make all of your decisions democratic! Even if you stick to lawful decisions, I might add. Besides, there are a lot of ways for elected officials to have different interests than the general population.
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That said, "democratic" does not mean "good". It is quite possible (though unlikely in my personal opinion) that the will of the people was wrong, and that European treaty was a good thing. In which case it was a good thing to go against the will of the people.
Serious. I'm not saying this particular decision was bad. I'm just saying it was undemocratic.
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One last thing: you say our "democratically elected" parliament had, among other things, a mandate to ratifying European treaties. Only problem was, the entire political class wanted this particular treaty to happen. Very few thought otherwise. And those had other opinions about other subjects that often made them a big no-no for most people (extreme right and extreme left, mostly).
We did not have much choice when we elected our officials. It was like, this guy who wanted the treaty to happen, and that gal who also wanted the treaty to happen, and maybe that crazy fellow who did not want this, but had also a couple insane ideas we did not endorse.
Not to say that everything's great in europe's current state of affair but be careful not to be too influenced by political propaganda. Remember that the political direction of the union is set by the council which comprises the various head of states of the union. It's not like the parliament is this rogue extranational body that unilaterally dictates its will to the members of the EU.
Just because it has an election attached to it (for which the turn out is so ridiculously low they might as well not bother) doesn't make it a democratic institution.
Any power the EP has or doesn't have (mostly the latter) didn't come about through democratic process.
Imposing a faux parliament on people, especially one that operates without the context of a democratic government, doesn't make it a democratic institution. Never mind the fact that so many of these parliament members are the deeply corrupt representatives of corrupt countries.
And the people know this, hence the fact that the majority of the people of Europe now boycots these elections. Especially in countries that have a decently functioning democracy themselves.
Everything that comes out of Brussels is undemocratic, unless it pertains to the sovereign nation of Belgium.
Also, can we keep it civilized? If you don't call all opponents to your EU dreams "xenophobic", I won't call you a "eurofascist", agreed?
I do agree that small scale/localised success - the long tail as it used to be referred to - is a positive force too. It looks like we all just have to learn to live with both camps (and many more besides) being given scope to thrive. Hopefully that's the best outcome, but this type of out of touch and obtuse legislation is not helping.
Total music industry is 15B (afaik). It is 1/150th of the entire music industry and that is just one site. I think the artist make more on Bandcamp and other music distribution platforms than on big labels, that might be the reason why Bandcamp is greatly successful.
I'm not surprised that Bandcamp has been doing that well for a long time now. In contrast to all those streaming services it's a business model that seems to be sustainable.
From that article I get the impression that the $100 million refers to all money paid during the existance of Bandcamp, while I suppose the 15B is annual? The article says that Bandcamp has revenue of $3.5 million a month (= $42 million a year), most of which goes to artists.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2015/03/10/direct-t...
And it all vanishes in the huge, bottomless maw of corporate greed, with little ever reaching any actual artist. It largely divides into shareholder value, outrageous manager payoffs, and.... errr... "investments" (meaning, money for more lobbying and bribes).
For start there is author tax to compensate authors for fair use, it is collected as VAT on empty mediums and printers. With this law many powerful people would loose money. I would welcome it, since it means cheaper hardware.
And secondly: YES! More stupid laws like this, more DRM and people will turn to free music under Creative-Commons like license.
People will continue to obey copyright laws as closely as ever. right.
> The government's choices are now to remove the private copying exception—making personal copying illegal again, or to supply additional evidence that copyright owners suffer no or minimal “harm” from personal copying, or else to begin imposing a new tax on users to compensate the indust
This is exactly the situation we have in Spain, a tax was created to compensate private copy.
Sure it would fly in Spain
"The UK's music industry has successfully landed a significant judgement from the UK's High Court, countering a copyright exception that was brought in by the UK government last year. Since last October, there was a law that allowed you to make private copies of your own music; now the future of that law is uncertain."
"The UK government brought in the new copyright exception under a European Union directive that gives national governments that power, but which requires compensation to be paid to artists unless the harm caused to them by the change in copyright law is minimal."
It is also fun to contrast the position on the rights holders between the eff:
"Neither can we fully absolve the rightsholders from blame;"
and Arstechnica:
"The refusal to accept gracefully legislative changes is not new for the copyright industry. Perhaps the most egregious example of its dog-in-the-manger attitude [snip]"
[1]: http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/06/music-industry-...
So I'm going to go and delete 90% of my mp3s and go and purchase a CD player this afternoon.
Actually nope, I'm going to continue to steal all my music out of a combination of apathy and disdain for the system.
Oh and continue to go to the odd gig.
Now the "rights holders" will have right to tax every storage medium you buy. n% of what you pay for your HDD goes to them. (And I don't know who is that, since everybody I lisen to won't get a cent)
We'll have direct democracy on this stuff yet! Look at the Swiss.
Sorry, I'm not sufficiently up to date on this stuff to know at what about the Swiss to look. Could you elaborate?
Also, the only people still buying CDs don't rip them, and the rest of us have ripped their last CD over a decade ago.
The actual impact of this decision is close to zero, and therefor not a strong argument for copyright reform. Many countries still have outdated laws on the books nobody bothers with, making noise about this just gives the impression copyright reform isn't urgent.