Read the following article in today’s Guardian which read just like a press release from the BPI.
Keep off cut-price music site, downloaders told.
A website for music download fans offering chart albums at a fraction of their usual cost looked like it was too good a deal to be true, and now legal experts are warning that Britain’s second-biggest download service probably is.
Thousands of internet users download music tracks and albums from the Russian-based website AllOfMP3.com which poses as a legitimate online store but actually sells pirated recordings.
Has The Guardian become the mouthpiece of the BPI?
What legal experts have made this warning about the legality of the service I wonder? Alice Gould of Wedlake Bell apparently. Wedlake Bell being a commercial law firm and Alice Gould being the partner who has expertise in intellectual property law and who seems to have been quoted again and again by news sources in recent months in articles concerning filesharing and the associated copyright infringement.
Why I wonder do I get the feeling that Wedlake Bell is the law firm that represents the BPI rather than being an independent firm offering their expert advice.
Having then checked the BPI’s website it does look like that in fact the BPI had released a press release today about them suing the site AllofMP3.com in the UK courts amongst many other things (including yet again the argument that term of copyright for sound recordings should be extended but I’ll address that issue in a different post) following an address to a House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee. The story has been covered by many other news sources including the BBC and The Register.
AllofMP3 claim that they are a legal service under Russian copyright law and that claim seems to stand up however much it dismissed by organisations like the BPI and the IFPI.
This seems to me to be nothing more than blatant scaremongering by the BPI. Regardless of whether AllofMP3.com are selling the files illegally or legally it is not I believe illegal under UK copyright law to purchase and import into this country any article which is, and which one knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work if it is solely for ones private and domestic use.
The relevant subsections of UK Copyright law are subsection 107 and subsection 22, the former is regarding Secondary infringement: importing infringing copy and the latter is regarding criminal liability for making or dealing with infringing articles.
The BPI claims that users are making copies of the works themselves when they make a purchase which could indeed be an interpretation of the law.
UK copyright law states that
Copying in relation to a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work means reproducing the work in any material form.
This includes storing the work in any medium by electronic means.
This might necessitate a court to clarify the meaning of this. But if you take the BPI’s line then any music file you download and store electronically is a copy that you the user has made even if you download it from a legal site such as iTunes, MP3.com or Tesco and surely such copying is an infringement unless licensed by the owner of the copyright.
Presumably the case is that these sites have acquired the right from the copyright owners for their users to make copies and the licence that AllofMP3 claims is has doesn’t cover this. At what point can it be said that the work is in the process of being stored electronically? Is the act of downloading the infringement or is it just the state of having a work in an electronic format stored on a medium.
Is an MP3 stored on your hard disk defined as being a copy of an artistic work, or is it defined as being the act of making a copy of an artistic work? If the former then the importation of that MP3 for personal use is not infringement if the latter then it is.
This would appear to me to be a legal grey area and a question of metaphysics.
There is clearly a moral issue to be highlighted here also as musicians are being deprived of any royalties they may have accrued if their works were purchased in the UK rather than via the AllofMP3 service.
AllofMP3 have released a statement in reply to the various accusations levelled against them. [via]