Following many other counties across the world, the United Kingdom has finally allowed its citizens to make personal copies of digital content if they have legally purchased it. The conditions are that the consumers can keep the duplicates on local storage or in the cloud for their own use, but are not allowed to share the content. By the way, many people in the United Kingdom believed they already had this law before. The matter is that most of the world has some fair use law for digital copying, but in Britain ripping CDs to other formats had previously been referred to as copyright violation, although such cases were rarely prosecuted. The recent changes to the legislation were detailed in June 2014, when the Intellectual Property Office issued the appropriate guidance, but those changes had not come into effect until now. The Minister for Intellectual Property explained that the changes will bring the intellectual property laws of the country into the 21st century. In other words, the British IP regime is expected to be responsive to the modern business environment or more flexible for consumers now. The suggested changes to the law also include permission to create parodies of copyright works, while in the past there has been a risk of being sued for copyright violation if using clips of films, TV shows or songs without the rights holder’s consent. At the moment, a lot of other European nations introduced a levy on sales of recordable media, including blank DVDs, memory cards and hard disks. Some of them also placed levy on MP3 players and video recorders. All of those proceeds are passed on to the media industry, but the reality is that all those measures are dying out along with physical formats.
