UK High Court's insane ruling: ripping CDs is illegal again

Pay-for-play charges? Definitely! A CD doesn’t get played without the bits first being copied from the disc to the player’s internal memory. And that, say the lawyers (and many judges agree) is already making a copy - and hence must be licensed.

What do people put on terabyte-sized hard drives, other than music, video, and photographs? All of which are most likely copyright-infringing, even if the user produced the material. It’s very hard to produce any video or photograph in an urban setting without incidentally capturing something subject to copyright, and there’s no de minimis exception in the law.

No, you’re not nearly evil enough. The next clever move beyond that is to hold users and vendors jointly and severally responsible for copyright infringement. That way, if it turns out after purchase that a record label has failed to clear a copyright, and goes bankrupt as a result, the copyright owner can come after the listeners for statutory damages. That’s the way it already works for patents. The entire supply chain from manufacturer to end user is liable.

Emails? Telemetry? CCTV surveillance videos? Rainbow tables and other pre-generated data?

The idea of 3d-printed guns in every household suddenly looks pretty appealing… Could quite decrease the reward/risk ratio for such wannabe extortionists.

…in a less violent way, would also make it prudent to obtain stuff from sources that do not record transactions; from anonymized p2p to sneakernets.

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Public-domain books, documents, etc. scanned to pdf because not every device can read djvu.

Their own notes scanned to pdf, because typing hurts more than scanning.

Backups of their files.

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