UK copyright tweak in June will finally allow ripping of CDs; Guardian, 3/31/14

Charles Arthur, Guardian; UK copyright tweak in June will finally allow ripping of CDs:

"Under the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, it is not in fact legal to transform a piece of copyrighted content from one storage form to another - so turning a CD, which is encoded in one method, into a file formatted as MP3 or Windows Media Audio or AAC and storing it on a computer hard drive or digital music player is, strictly, against the law.

Record labels have known about this for years - but have turned a blind eye, because prosecuting everyone who bought a music player or transferred files to their phone would be both ruinously expensive and terrible publicity.

But, the IPO guidance points out, "it will still be illegal to make copies for friends or family, or to make a copy of something you do not own or have acquired illegally, without the copyright owner's permission. So you will not be able to make copies of CDs for your friends, to copy CDs borrowed from friends, or to copy videos illegally downloaded from file-sharing websites.""