Oddball informs us that the British
Phonographic Institute (BPI) has won a
legal battle against EasyInternet, a large chain of internet cafés
based in the U.K. The company got into trouble because it let customers burn
(illegally) downloaded music files onto CD-R's:
 EasyInternet is to pay £210,000 in damages and costs to the UK
record industry body for running unlicensed CD burning of music downloads
in its stores. It is also to abandon its appeal against the ruling in
favour of BPI's copyright infringement claim delivered in the High Court
in January. EasyInternet had a novel defence - that it was simply helping
customers to time-shift, an exemption under UK copyright law, allowing
people to record programmes to watch at a later time.
As the BPI notes: "In EasyInternet's
case, this defence was clearly not relevant since it was offering a
commercial service. Nor does the exemption cover unlicensed online
services and CD burning for domestic purposes '“ the law is clear and there
are no loopholes." |
When you're charging people to burn their
downloaded MP3 files then you can of course be sure that you'll get into trouble
sooner or later. EasyInternet should have known better than
that..
Source: The Register
