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Copyright legislation - Copying to an MP3 player becoming illegal !!!

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Carol Haynes:
A really interesting article on AfterDawn about the new European legislation:

Basically using, owning or even discussing techniques on how to circumvent copy protection on DVDs or CDs would become illegal under this legislation.

Mentioning software on a website could be considered advertising such products and hence illegal!

Read and weep ...

Comments?

mouser:
Mentioning software on a website could be considered advertising such products and hence illegal!
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totally ridiculous and stupid and seems a clear infringement on free speech.

Carol Haynes:
totally ridiculous and stupid and seems a clear infringement on free speech.
-mouser (October 06, 2005, 07:12 PM)
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I agree but how many webhosting services will take the risk? The music industry has been singularly unsuccessful in courts so far but the legal expenses are enough to make anyone think twice - especially as they seem to specialiase on picking on the little people who can't afford to fight!

You can already see what has happened with StreamBox, SmartRipper etc. Do we really want all the useful software to become stagnant and only only available from dodgy Russian pron sites? That's the way it seems to be going!

In the UK the government have already tried to make encrypted email illegal because they like to snoop emails (so much for democracy). I am not sure if it has made it into legislation yet but they were certainly suggesting that sending encrypted emails or attachments would become a criminal offense - trouble is many ISPs already respond to a lot of these issues in a very defensive way.

What I find amazing is that ultimately it seems that we will be forced to buy DRMed download versions from the web if we want to use MP3 players because you can bet your life that protected CDs are going to grow in number! So we buy inferior quality downloads, and in the case of classical music a very much reduced catalogue.

What we need is a worlwide campaign to publicise all protected CD's and boycott them en masse ...

mouser:
it seems often that the question is not who is legally in the right, but who can afford the lawsuits.
again the little guy loses.

as for fighting the drm stuff - i suspect it is a losing battle.  big corporations have jus too much power.  i suspect we will see digital rights management hardware in all pcs/electronics soon.

markan:

Basically using, owning or even discussing techniques on how to circumvent copy protection on DVDs or CDs would become illegal under this legislation.

-CarolHaynes (October 06, 2005, 03:20 PM)
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I am pretty sure that in the UK circumventing copy protection on CDs or DVDs is already a criminal offence under the The Copyright And Rights Regulations Act! I think that came in at the end of 2003.

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