http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/may/18/hargreaves-report-recommends-overhaul-of-copyright-laws

Helllo?!

Making book on how quickly business jumps all over it and kills it!

Kill it? Businesses will LOVE it as long as they can strongarm or bribe people to rewrite the laws to make sure that you never own a copy of anything, its just a rental for a set period of time revokable for any reason and without any notice.They say there's one every generation in each country, they're usually hunted for their meat and tasty brain

Congratulations on joining the special 301 club. Your t-shirts are in the mail.

What they really need is to make it so some common sense is used in the paying of royalties for licenced music in other media. Always pay the artists (well the middlemen) but make it in proportion to the value of the music.

A few episodes of Dr Who have been edited on DVD because of the cost of licencing a few seconds of real music, noone is ever going to convince me that Hendrix fans are all clamouring to buy Revelation Of The Daleks for the 10 seconds you hear of the song Fire. The addition of value to the program is negligible at best and should be bloody well paid as such.

For something like GTA4 the radio stations were a notable drawcard to the extent that the announcement of the track listing is a big talking point but a real song on a radio in the background of a tv show that characters walk by whilst talking? Fuck no, a few bucks at best

Nice idea, in theory. In practice....? They'll demand full price, even for a few seconds. "It's your fault you didn't use the whole song!"

Hence the need for reform in that area

So what is the 301 club?

http://www.iipa.com/special301.html

OK, thanks

""We concluded that importing fair use wholesale was unlikely to be legally feasible in Europe,""

oh hey look we're still screwed over and have no rights... it's a joke they want to grant us no extra rights and just make it easier for the copyright holders to claim money off you seriously the report advocates a centralised Copyright database that can charge people whenever it discovers a usage of copyright material without first checking if it's allowable. First thing I could see happening is the source of the Linux kernal being added by someone then because the systems automated the bills will start flying.

It's purely a way to allow companies to profit off orphen works the only decent change is the allowance of format shifting and that will be quietly removed at some point.