Europeans Make Really Stupid Copyright Decisions, Too

The EFF has a nice piece up about "European Copyright Madness". At issue is a UK High Court decision that effectively says people aren't allowed to rip (mix, burn!) their own CDs. Uh, yeah. Guys, we fought this fight last century and the anti-ripping forces lost.

Jeremy Malcom, the column's author, points out that the root cause is the European Copyright Directive, which the High Court might have interpreted correctly but in so doing have revealed its broken-ness. Broken in the sense that it's detached from reality. It deals with hypotheticals, such as "hypothetically, you might buy a copy of the same CD to play in your car that you already own to play in your house." A quick glance around my personal household (two adults, two music-loving kids, two cars) says that this logic means we would buy six copies of every CD.

That is... an interesting conclusion. And I'm with Malcom in pointing out that if your process produces nonsense conclusions then there may be something wrong with the premises you're using at the start. In this case, it's the premise of economic harm and the idea that the value I'm paying for in buying music is somehow localized to one device that plays back that music.

Yeah, not so much.