I recently signed a petition on the 10 Downing Street website asking for the legalisation of making a private copy of a copyrighted work for personal use. This already happens anyway, and so it makes sense for this right to be enshrined in law.

I got an email from Downing Street today to notify me that the Government had responded to the petition, and I was pleased to see that they were in favour (my emphasis):

As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced that there would be a review of the intellectual property framework in the UK, led by Andrew Gowers.

The findings of this review have now been published and recommend the introduction of a private copying exception for the purposes of format shifting. This would allow individuals to copy music which they have legally bought on compact disc onto an MP3 player without infringing copyright.

The Government welcomes this recommendation and is currently considering how such an exception should be created in UK law.

From this statement, it would seem that the ‘format shifting’ exception extends beyond copying from music from CDs to MP3s to copying music from, for example, Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM to MP3. It being legal to format shift songs from a DRM format to a standard format would, for example, render any DRM cracking tool perfectly legal in the UK, and thus it would not be possible to order it to be taken down.

If my supposition is correct, and this law does come into effect in such a way as DRM cracking is legal, we could end up with an arms race of far greater proportions than seen before between the content owners who wish to be protected by DRM and those who don’t wish to have their content restricted. Given that all DRM is inevitably susceptible to cracking, I have little doubt that ultimately DRM would become unworkable if this law were passed.

That would make for an interesting situation.