Oh, well, now …
It looks — LOOKS — like I can honestly turn around and say “Well, FINALLY” with both a certain amount of force.
And a certain amount of relief, as well.
Because, after a certain amount of consideration, Business Secretary, Vince Cable has announced the government’s response to the Hargreaves Report on Intellectual Property and Growth.
And it’s favourable.
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Just so you know, the report was published some time ago, and deals with the state of UK copyright law in the modern age: and, in part, how to deal with one or two of the anomalies of UK copyright law.
The bit of it that’s always struck me and many others as stupid, here … ?
Is the simple fact that in the UK, one cannot do what’s become known as format shifting.
In other words … ?
We can’t, legally, copy a CD or DVD we own from the original optical media, to our hard drive, and then to an iPod, MP3 player, flash drive*, external back up drive, home theatre computer … or the earlier models of Apple TV streaming device.
Ridiculous, really, isn’t it … ?
But, at ANY rate … ?
As you’ll have probably figured out, I’ve always thought that that was — speaking frankly — bloody stupid.
The law, in this sort of case, is not only an ass, but a bloody slow one, at that.
It’ll still be slow.
But if you’ve been watching the news, today, you’ll know that Business Secretary Vince Cable has announced the the coalition government will — in possibly the only good move I think they’ll make — be accepting those conclusions.
He also announced that the government will be dropping the web-site blocking aspects of the Digital Economy Act, that passed into law, just before the general election.
Mostly because of the legal moves afoot to force ISPs to block them: something I believe to be very dodgy ground. After all, it’s turning the people who provide you and me with access to the ’Net into policemen. And policemen I’d rather not have stomping around MY hard-drive, just on principle, thanking you … !
But, at ANY rate … ?
At any rate, this hopefully means that, now Mr Cable’s announced this … ?
It means we can all heave a collective sigh of relief.
Because we’re now no longer being made criminals, unintentionally.
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* I mention that as many modern models of DVD and Blu-Ray player/recorders, PVR and television set have USB ports on them, and happily play any correctly encoded video file on a USB flash drive.
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