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Comment by keithpeter | Hacker News Reader

"It's unclear how the change will be enforced."

Here we go again. The UK Government keep saying we want more high skilled jobs/technology/'digital' but we criminalise a huge percentage of the population that engage in basically harmless format shifting and render hardware start-ups[1] marginal.

Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting?

[1] http://www.brennan.co.uk/

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To be fair, it was the government that passed a law to legalise such activity; it was the industry that challenged that law and the High Court that overturned it!

It's also the government that made such activity illegal in the first place through copyright law and excessively strict interpretation thereof. Without that, it wouldn't need a law to "legalise" it.

So other countries can frame laws that don't criminalise a large percentage of the economically active electorate. Why couldn't Call-Me-Dave? Have you got any insight/reasons?

Nope.

Call-Me-Dave had to backtrack after making out he wanted to ban encryption and a bunch of smart computer scientists and cryptographers made him look foolish. I guess there in lies why Call-Me-Dave couldn't.

> Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting?

Isn't that what was done, and the decision here is striking that law down? It looks like you can't frame a law that allows format shifting without paying the copyright holder of the work.

Correct. After all, the copyright holders (who are ultimately the creators, followed by their contractual assignees) are citizens too, so if the government renders their economic relations de facto obsolete (even if negligently rather than deliberately) then they are being discriminated against through no fault of their own.

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