Whatever. Zero fucks given. I have no physical media and never will again. Not playing these games any more. I'll continue to steal stuff. If it is good, I'll buy the mp3 or go to a gig.<p>What about those newly defined criminals Amazon with AutoRip?
<i>"It's unclear how the change will be enforced."</i><p>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.<p>Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.brennan.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brennan.co.uk/</a>
So, now that the masses have been (criminally) copying music and films into their computers roughly for a couple of decades and we've maybe ten years ago passed the point where music (and mostly films, too) are <i>basically unconsumable unless</i> they're in digital format, these people actually make a focused effort to shoot down a law that legalises this widely de facto usage, just to get back to the same old reality with a completely unenforceable situation that nobody cares about——based on the lack of court action, not even themselves?<p>They might see it as some sort of a moral victory but I had no idea they were so utterly out of touch with reality, for real.
I want to support artists and stuff, but the music industry is making it so hard for me to do that in good conscience with their anti-consumer stances.
The actual judgement: <a href="http://www.ukmusic.org/assets/general/APPROVED_JUDGMENT_BASCA_second_hearing.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.ukmusic.org/assets/general/APPROVED_JUDGMENT_BASC...</a><p>But most of the meat is in this earlier one: <a href="https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/basca-v-sofs-bis-judgment.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/basc...</a><p>The main claim made by the music industry in this case was that when the law was introduced no provision was made to compensate copyright holders for the harm it would (allegedly) do them, and that the government failed to demonstrate that it had adequate evidence for claiming that it didn't need to because no substantial harm was done.<p>(Apparently there is some requirement, when the government brings in a new law, that those non-negligibly harmed by it should be compensated. I do not know the details. I would be interested to know on what occasions if any they've actually done this. I've certainly never heard, e.g., of anyone being recompensed because the government has introduced a new tax on the sale of an asset they hold a lot of -- but that might be quite a different situation because it doesn't exactly involve new laws.)<p>The judge, to be clear, didn't find that there <i>is</i> substantial harm. Only that the government hadn't adequately established that there <i>isn't</i>. This was a purely procedural matter.<p>The music industry made a bunch of other claims, on which the judge found in favour of the government. For instance, when assessing the harm done to copyright holders, the government essentially asked the question: would they actually sell fewer copies with a limited-private-use exemption in law than without? The music industry contended that instead "harm" should be measured by assuming that every copy taken is a sale lost. Unsurprisingly, the judge agreed with the government on this.<p>So it seems at least possible that the government may go away, lick its wounds, come up with a bigger pile of better evidence that a law of this kind will not in fact make any substantial difference to the music industry's profits, and then pass pretty much the exact same law again. I do hope so.<p>Or they might come up with a smaller easier-to-marshal body of evidence that the harm is <i>really rather small</i>, and pass a similar law that does compensate the music industry just a little.<p>I fear that actually they'll just drop the issue, though, and leave us with a stupid restriction that most of the population ignores and that no one is realistically going to be able to use to prosecute anyone anyhow.