UK makes it illegal to copy or rip music…again

The UK has made it illegal once again to make personal copies of your music so that you can store them in the cloud, or rip songs from CDs.

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has decided to abandon an exception to copyright law that allowed people to make copies of media for their own personal use. That means that in theory people could be sent to jail simply for using iTunes.

The exception was introduced in October 2014 to ensure that people could use the music that they owned across different devices.

But it was the subject of a judicial review from industry bodies in June this year. The High Court ruled that the exception was flawed and abandoned it, meaning that making any copy of media is illegal.

Now, the IPO has decided to abandon the exception, according to 1709 Blog. Rulings in the European court have made it too difficult to create a scheme that would allow rights holders to be compensated for the copying, but not introduce a complicated system of levies that users would have to pay whenever they backed up or transferred their music.

It means that ripping music, moving it from a CD to an iPod and using iTunes are all breaking the law, which is unlikely to be reversed. Hopwever it is unlikely that anyone making copies of music will actually be pursued by authorities. When the exception was previously removed, prosecutions and claims for compensation were very rare and such cases tend to be ignored.