14 DAY TRIAL // A recent decision by the UK High Court to overturn a new law introduced by the UK government a year before is making a mess of the UK copyright laws.
Prior to 2014, laws were in place that prevented users from copying copyrighted material to other devices. This law was used in the past by recording agencies to go after individuals or groups that made money off CD ripping.
In 2014, the UK government revamped this ancient form of the copyright law, allowing users to easily copy copyrighted material from one medium to another if they have previously paid for it.
Both mass media and the general public appraised this new form of the law, but several music groups contested it at the UK High Court, which today has overturned the 2014 amendment.
iTunes made illegal by reverting to an ancient form of the copyright law
This means the UK is not only stepping backwards one year but actually falling back to the previous century, when people still used CDs, nobody ever heard of USB sticks, cloud services or computer backups.
All of these are now all somewhat illegal, meaning if you move a file from your CD to your computer, a USB stick, a cloud account, or into iTunes, you risk ... No! You actually break the law in the UK.
Furthermore, making a computer backup is also illegal if your backup archive contains copyrighted music files, and if you rip a CD with songs you've previously bought using iTunes.
Desperate times call for desperate measures
Trying to grab any kind of revenue stream, music companies have managed to transform anybody in the UK into a future criminal, because, at one point or another, every single UK citizen is going to do one of the illicit activities we listed above.
As TorrentFreak notes, iTunes had at one point in the past advertised its CD ripping capabilities during the software's installation screen, but as we've tested today, this message is now gone.
We don't think Apple removed it because it's afraid of lawsuits from UK music groups, but we tend to believe it did so because nobody uses CDs anymore. Something the UK music groups need to accept and give this whole "CD ripping law" a rest already.
