A few months ago we reported on a couple of decisions by the England and Wales Hight Court declaring private copying illegal (here and here). Incredibly, before 2014 making a private copy of a legally-purchased work was illegal in the UK, which didn’t stop anyone ripping CDs or making digital Read more…
The Open Rights Group (ORG) has sent us a communication regarding a new proposal in the UK to criminalise copyright infringement beyond the current limits to up to 10 years. I reproduce their statement about the proposals. “The IPO has recently started consultation on proposals to increase the maximum prison Read more…
My social media timeline has been inundated with reports that iTunes is now illegal in the UK. The origin of the story is an article in TorrentFreak, where the author contacted the UK IP Office to ask about a recent High Court decision that repealed legislation making it legal to Read more…
My social media timeline is filled with links to an article on Torrent Freak by Rick Falvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. The article is entitled “The Entire Copyright Monopoly Idea is Based on a Lie“. The article sets out to criticise the social contract that gives copyright Read more…
It has been often remarked in these pages that we seem to be going back in time when it comes to copyright case law. In particular, the fact that the Court of Justice of the European Union continues to decide cases about linking seems to me to be a baffling Read more…
The Court of Justice of the European Union has produced an interesting decision regarding copyright levies in the case of Copydan Båndkopi v Nokia Danmark (C‑463/12). Some European countries have established a copyright levy scheme for blank media, this means that whenever there is a sale of a product that Read more…
On December 9 2014, Swedish police raided the servers of the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, and finally managed to shut down the service for the first time since its creation in 2003. Police acted from a complaint from Swedish rights holder anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, and while I have Read more…
You are just waking up from a 28-day coma, the world is a desolate wasteland, the zombie apocalypse has come unleashed by the release of the new U2 album Songs of Innocence. At least this is the idea that you would get if you were reading Twitter, where people have Read more…