First, a disclosure, I recently committed a crime: I copied a CD I had bought on to my hard disk and this is illegal under section 16 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which prohibits any copying in relation to “a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work”, including storing it by “electronic means”. I was reminded of this recent, albeit redundant, law when I was trying out Radiotracker 2, costing £19.99. It is one of a number of programs that scans thousands of internet radio stations of varying legality to grab any tracks – by genre or artist – you want from those currently being played.
Even if a song is halfway through, it can capture the whole track for use on a computer or music player. The program, for PCs, is apparently legal because the music comes from a radio station rather than someone else’s hard disk – as long as it is for your own use. This shows what a difficult job the Gowers committee, shortly to report, has in sorting out intellectual property rights.
In a digital age it looks preposterous, to consumers if not producers, that copyrights on books and songs last from 70 years after the death of the authors. These laws have left in their wake millions of “orphaned” books, which are being digitised by Google and others in order to be printed on demand – but no one knows whether the copyright holders are still alive, and it would cost too much to find out. One of the problems is that the laws have been driven by commercial rather than consumer lobbies.
The record industry is slowly getting its act together, having been typically slow to see the exciting but disruptive opportunities offered by the great innovations of the internet: that extra copies cost virtually nothing to manufacture and nothing to deliver. But it is still making big mistakes by trying to impose its own digital rights management (DRM) contracts on customers, laying down what they can and can’t do with a track, thereby overriding existing copyright law. Just as they have been extracting compensation from mass downloaders under threat of court action, so they are, in effect, acting as judge and jury with customers by imposing special contracts. It is very difficult to buy a track and freely play it. You buy a licence for specified formats on certain machines, maybe with a time limit imposed. If only the industry would provide interoperable, affordable tracks, most people would be only too happy to pay. They cough up huge sums on ringtones, for goodness sake.
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