The Institute For Public Policy Research (everyone's favourite centre-left think tank) has called for changes to UK copyright laws to allow for an equivalent of what US laws call the 'fair use' system, which permits individual record buyers to make digital copies of CDs for their own personal use. The think tank has expressed the viewpoint as part of a report issued in advance on the government's own review on all things copyright, the previously reported Gower Review.
As previously reported, every time you rip a CD to your PC in the UK you are, technically speaking, breaking the law, even if you don't make copies of those tracks available to anyone else. It's a stupid law, of course, because millions of people rip tracks in that way, and the record companies have said that they would never take action against anyone who does so, even though technically speaking they could (though quite how the courts would rule on such a case I don't know).
With all that in mind, IPPR Deputy Director Dr Ian Kearns has called for the law to formally catch up with reality: "British copyright law is out of date with consumer practices and technological progress. Giving people a legal 'private right to copy' would allow them to copy their own CDs and DVDs onto their home computers, laptops or phones without breaking the law".
It's a pretty uncontroversial viewpoint really - unless, of course, you advocate a levy system like that which operates elsewhere in Europe, where a levy is charged on blank tapes and CDRs, and on MP3 players, to compensate content owners for the private copying of their work. Given that the electronics industry are busy lobbying the EU in a bid to have that levy removed in those European countries where it operates, the whole 'fair use' thing can be contentious at times.
Also contentious is the length of the recorded copyright in Europe which, as previously reported, the record industry wants to see expanded to, well, considerably more than the current 50 years. The Institute has taken a slightly more controversial viewpoint in this domain, calling on the government to reject calls for an extension in recorded copyrights. I suspect the combined power of recorded copyright owners will, in the end, have more sway than the think tank, though it is interesting to see someone other than the usual consumer rights groups opposing the record labels' line on this one.