Copying music, film and other digital media for personal use is to be made legal under changes to how the UK government enforces copyright.
The changes will be introduced in 2013 and will enable third parties to reproduce copyrighted work without permission from rights holders when copying works for individual use, parody or quotation. They will allow people to legally rip MP3s from their CDs and copy digital versions of films they own, a practice that is currently illegal, although no one is prosecuted for it.
Read more :
CD ripping to be permitted following UK copyright reform | ZDNet
Hi there
Happy Xmas and new year.
What's a CD !! -- does anybody BUY these any more.


- Even if you like High quality music rather than compressed mp3's you can get these via electronic download (LEGAL !!) from a lot of sites -- I like classical music and this site for example has legal DRM free downloads for purchase.
For example
http://www.linnrecords.com/
and here
http://www.eclassical.com/ ==> this has an interesting business model too -- per SECOND charging so you pay for quantity of music rather than "Per CD" or whatever. Time will tell if this model works.
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World's first download music store with per-second charging.
We thought the music business needed a new pricing model. In any of today’s common music websites, customers pay per track, regardless of how long the track is, up to a limit - then they pay double, triple or more, depending on some rules that make sense to those who decide on the pricing, but that leave customers quite confused and unsure of what they get for their money. Or often, it is a fixed album price, regardless if it is 39 minutes or 82. Hmm…
It's the same with postage. I know it's not only me that gets irritated when one has to pay double postage just because the letter weighs 21 grammes, 1 gram over the 20 gram limit. So, for this 1 gram one pays the postage for a further 29 grammes, since the next limit is 50 grammes.
At eClassical we have decided to rethink the whole pricing system, and so from now on, you pay for precisely what you buy, not more, not less. This is done by charging per second, and the charge is set at a level where a normal album will not be more expensive than before, rather very often the contrary. The per second price in US$ is 0.2-0.3 cent/sec, which works out at 8.40-12.60 for a 70-minute album. In 24-bit these numbers are 0.3-0.55 cents/sec or 12.60-23.10 for a 70-minute album.
So you can forget about tracks and track durations, or albums and their durations. You can just buy whatever you want to have, from any album, and, the way this works out, you get what you pay for!
Enjoy!
George Olvik
CEO, eClassical.com
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I ripped all my cd's to FLAC years ago -- Most of my colleagues did as well -- so even though this law pertains to the UK doesn't it remind you of "Horses and Stable doors".
With most of the horrendous problems in West and Northern Europe you'd think the politicians would try and sort out the Economic mess this whole area is in and do things to stimulate Job creation etc rather than waste time with this sort of stuff which people did YEARS ago and never had the slightest smidgen of being even remotely enforceable.
@Solarshines
The Forum rules don't permit me to name the site -- but there is ONE cryptically known as "The fillipino felines" which usually has extremely fast downloads - sometimes as high as 5 or 6 Mb/sec with plenty of seeders- and often has complete full DVD rips so Bit torrent stuff isn't always as poor quality as it used to be.
I agree though bit torrent isn't the best or recommended way -- but often if content either isn't available any more or not available in your area then this is the only solution.
I'd always prefer to buy the content - but in some countries the threat of prosecution for removing the regional encoding on a DVD or copy protection can carry a HIGHER penalty than for actually downloading an entire Pirated copy from a torrent site.
Lawyers --go and figure that one out too. !!!
I do draw the line at this however screenshot enc.
Cheers
jimbo