Described by one news website as an "astonishing" statistic, but surely a dead cert candidate for "bleeding obvious stat of the week", the UK's National Consumer Council has revealed that half of British consumers are infringing the country's copyright laws by copying music from CDs onto their PCs or portable MP3 players, and that a similar amount are unaware that to do so is technically illegal.
Those statistics appear in a survey undertaken by YouGov, and have been published by the NCC as part of its contribution to the previously reported government review on all things copyright. By focusing on the laws that forbid the transferring of music from CDs to other digital devices, even for private use - a law few consumers adhere to - the NCC hopes to illustrate some of the ways that current copyright laws are hopelessly out of touch with the reality of the digital music age.
The organisation's Jill Johnstone told reporters last week: "We need to shake up the copyright law to incorporate the right to copy for private use".
Of course, a change in the copyright laws regarding private copying are not generally opposed by the music industry, who never enforce this right anyway, and we heard a rumour that the BPI themselves has made proposals for changes in this area in their submission to the copyright review.
The area in which the BPI and NCC will not agree, however, is the proposed extension of recording copyrights which, as previously reported, the record labels want increased from the current 50 years in order to bring a recording copyright in Europe more in line with copyrights elsewhere in the world, and with the songwriter royalty, which currently runs for the songwriter's lifetime plus seventy years.
On that issue Johnstone continued: "The current campaign to extend copyright terms for sound recordings beyond 50 years has no justification. Evidence shows music companies generally make returns on material in a matter of years, not decades. Current terms already provide excessive protection of intellectual property rights at a cost to consumers."