Home taping is (still) killing music

I’m wondering if I should be worried about the fact that a student in the US is being sued under the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) for publishing a paper on the Internet telling people how circumvent CD copy protection using the complex method of pressing the SHIFT key, given that I proposed a similar technique back in July. As this week’s NTK points out, the European equivalent legislation, the EUCD, comes into effect in just a couple of weeks, having been passed by Parliament last week:

“The final implementation, signed off by Parliament last Friday (yes, we missed it too), now makes time-shifting TV shows only legal “for domestic use”, bans practically anything else, and puts the DMCA-like clampers on breaking copyright protection.”

Oops. Well then, if you happen to purchase a CD that breaks the Red Book standard (and therefore isn’t technically a CD at all) by employing copy-protection that is ludicrously easy to cicumvent, and foolishly want to listen to the thing on your PC, well, it wasn’t me that told you how to do it. Honest.