BPI 'will not pursue' consumers who copy music for personal use

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has said it won't pursue consumers who copy music from their CDs to listen to on portable music players.

Giving evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media & Sport inquiry into New Media and the Creative Industries yesterday, the trade body said it didn't consider copying to different devices a problem as long as it was solely for personal use.

UK consumers who rip CDs they have bought in order to fill an iPod or other MP3 player are technically guilty of copyright infringement. The BPI didn't say how it would collar any consumer transferring music from paid for CDs to other devices, but its chairman Peter Jamieson admitted this activity is widespread.

"Traditionally the recording industry has turned a blind eye to private copying and has used the strength of the law to pursue commercial pirates," he said.

"We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties. We want to make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format, we will not pursue them." 

The Select Committee was also told why the recording industry believed existing copyright terms should be extended, as well as discussing the interoperability of devices and the price of downloads.

The BPI, which is calling for the law to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from the current 50 years to 95 years, said the current term is outdated. It also said it discriminates against recording artists, and "even more importantly threatens economic damage to one of the UK’s most successful export industries".

"British music is one of Britain's greatest ambassadors, but failure to extend the copyright term could turn an export into an import. If we lose the crown jewels of British music, little money will flow back to the UK," said Mr Jamieson.

However, when questioned about the dominance of Apple’s iTunes download service he said it wasn't "particularly healthy" for any one company to have such a dominant share.

iPods currently only play unprotected MP3 files, such as those ripped from CDs, or songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. It applies its own Digital Rights Management (DRM) to the downloads it sells, that prevents them from being compatible with non-iPod music players.

DRM protection also prevents downloads purchased from most other legal download services, such as Napster and HMV Digital, from being played on iPods. Mr Jamieson called on Apple to open up its software in order to be compatible with other players.

"We would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability," he said.

Mark Richardson, Managing Director of Independent Records, took on board the issue of pricing which was raised as an issue recently. When questioned on the relative prices of CDs and downloads, he said that for an independent company like his, the costs charged by digital distributors are actually higher than those for a physical product.

"It is early days for digital music. At this point the cost of distribution for downloads is actually higher than for CDs. Regardless of that, however, distribution remains a relatively small part of the investment record companies make in music.

"All of the key costs for a piece of music remain virtually the same whatever format you distribute it on," he said.