Germany Outlaws Burning CDs Made From Illegally Obtained Music

New copyright law criminalizes the use of music obtained from illegal file-sharing.

Last Friday Germany’s upper house of parliament approved a controversial new copyright law that makes it illegal for individuals to make copies of music and movies if they were obtained illegally.

Pushing aside criticism from consumer protection groups, the Bundesrat passed the law which now outlaws private copies of content gotten from sources like illegal P2P and file-sharing networks.

Set to take effect in 2008, consumer groups and the Green Party alike tried to include an exemption that would not criminalize youths and other private users to no avail. They wanted to make it so that there had to be a profit motive involved and not merely single out the source of the content for a crime to have occurred.

Brigitte Zypris, Germany’s federal justice minister, claimed that this measure now brings Germany into line with European Union codes. But, many however, argue that the law goes far beyond previously proposed legislation and is merely an attempt to help out the country’s entertainment industry.

The law may look good on paper, but how they expect to actually bust people for making bootleg CDs remains to be seen. Illegally obtained or not, music all looks the same. So short of doing an exhaustive forensics exam of a person’s PC, it ought to be pretty much impossible to actually bust anybody.

Either way, it’s clear that Germany has embarked on a dark new path as of late by enacting draconian intellectual property laws that may protect the works of "starving" actors and music artists, but may also effectively kill the free flow of information in the process.

With the IFPI taking out eDonkey servers one by one it may just be a matter of time before Germans will have to go back to old-fashioned P2P, as in actual person to person, face to face transactions.

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