Wrote a wee letter to Vince Cable, Lord James Younger of Leckie and my MP. Possibly I shouldn’t have casually accused them of copyright infringement, but I think the other points are solid…
I was motivated to write by the campaign on Open Rights Group website. It’s an important subject. (Interesting choice of examples on it too; my MP, Tom Harris, lost his Social Media Bod post for making a ‘Downfall’ parody…)
Hi,
I’ve just read about the copyright reform legislation which has seemingly been delayed. I hadn’t realised that copyright reform was on the table, which is excellent news!
Too much of UK copyright law is utterly out of touch with public attitudes to copyright (to the extent that most people in the UK, probably including you*, breach the letter of copyright law on a fairly regular basis).
An excellent start would be liberalising some of the obvious stuff, like the right to make copies of digital content which you own, and enshrining the right to use others’ copyrighted material for the purposes of comment, parody, reportage, etc.
In the first case, as you know, in the digital realm, ALL legitimate use of content involves ‘copying’ it, and the law is out of touch with not only human behaviour, but also technological reality.
In the second case, allowing use of copyrighted material for comment and parody, the law would not only be codifying most reasonable people’s expectations, but also strongly supporting freedom of expression.
I hope you can help to get some sensible copyright law reform implemented.
Kind regards,
Me
* Oops