Originally Posted by Brian Austin Whitney
If you lived in Europe, you'd have to pay a lot more for a lot more uses. For example, if you have a party with 3 friends over and you're playing music on a boombox for them, you may very well wake up the next morning with a bill attached to your door for the usage. And I am not making that up. They take their music rights very seriously in Europe. Of course it's also a corrupted system in many ways, but it's certainly far more restrictive than the US is in how you use your own copy of music.


That's certainly not true for all of Europe. There is no single pan-European copyright law, each country has its own version. Downloading, for example, is legal in The Netherlands, while ripping a CD to your iPod on the other hand is formally illegal in the UK.

There's all sorts of fun idiosyncrasies with the current patch work of laws. For example, in The Netherlands it is allowed to make hard copies for personal use and copyright holders are supposedly compensated for this with levies that are collected on all blank media. The first problem is that the organization that collects the levies has yet to figure out how to distribute the money fairly (since they don't know who copied what how many times). The second problem is that, due to the EU requiring free traffic of all goods between member states, I am absolutely free to order my CD-Rs from a company in Germany, where those levies aren't collected. (I could order from the US as well, but then I'll have to pay import taxes).

Of course, the EU are striving to harmonize these laws across states, but that will probably take a few more years at least, knowing how slow the political windmills turn...

(to further complicate matters, the European Union does not currently include all European countries)

Jim Offerman ~ inspirational pop music
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