I’ve been hearing this on the radio all day (Planet Rock, of course). It’s appearing on the newsfeeds now.
The government is to modernise the intellectual property (IP) laws – for most of us, that means that copying your own (purchased) CDs to your computer of MP3 player will no longer be technically illegal, as it is at present.
On the radio, ministers were using the argument that technology has moved forward in such a way that an overhaul is urgently needed. I couldn’t agree more.
Mind you, it is only a change in name. Most people have been recording their stuff since it came on vinyl. I’ve got to be honest and say that I always transferred my vinyl straight to cassette tape back in the days when that was all we had. I did it for two reasons:
- I didn’t want to damage the vinyl
- I wanted to listen to it in the car
Cassettes were notoriously unreliable. If your play heads got dirty, the crap transferred to the tape and it was virtually ruined as far as the sound was concerned. If you left cassettes in the car, the heat in summer was liable to weld the tape on the spool, so the chances of a major ravelling episode was high. And the sound quality – even on the few I purchased as originals – was inferior to that of the vinyl.
Of course, there was the added bonus that if you made your own tapes, if any of the above happened then you could just make another one.
I’ve never purchased a pirated copy of any album, and I’ve only recorded or ripped those that I own.
Now, in the Napster days I did download some stuff after I got my first MP3 player in the late 90s. But the quality of some of the stuff on there was appalling, and people lied about their connection speed – you’d have some yokel in rural America claiming he had a T1 connection, when he was connected by a piece of wet string and two coconut shells. It could take days to download a single track you were after. Or you’d wait hours to get something, only to find that it was a version by the idiot hosting it on his Bontempi organ or Stylophone.
And then there was that time I downloaded a track, only to find it was a VBS file named as the track in question (I didn’t open it).