As reported in the IMPACT legal blog and elsewhere, the UK government has launched a consultation on copyright exceptions. Perhaps unknown to many people, it is currently illegal in the UK to copy works, such as music and video, from format to format, device to device, unless explicitly permitted by the licence. Although many millions of people have probably copied music from CDs to their computer or music player, or from their computer to a CD to listen to in their car, this is usually illegal.

The proposals being consulted about, however, include the idea that consumers should be able to "make a copy of a work they legally own, so that they can make the work accessible in another format for playback on a device in their lawful possession". The aim of this exception would be to permit "format shifting", the "copying of legitimately owned works to different formats for use on different devices". The full consultation document is available here.

This seems to me to be one of the most immediately sensible and non-controversial things the government could do in the field of copyright at present.

But, restrictive DRM technology has been quietly, and not so quietly, weaving its way into people's homes and lives, on devices and in their music and video files. Current DRM technologies physically prohibit the kind of copying being proposed in the consultation, without reference to any national laws. How can these two ideas be reconciled?

Well, it's no secret that I am no fan of DRM, and would love this to signal the demise of such schemes which impose technical restrictions far beyond legal limitations. So, would this kind of DRM under such a new law be illegal? That seems an unknown at present, but even if not it seems unfair to criminalise anyone hacking such a DRM system in order to obtain their legal rights.

At last, it seems that the mainstream media are beginning to provide a more accurate view of what Apple is all about, rather than contributing to the bizarre belief in their position as some kind of cool community-driven, anti-monopoly company. Welcome to the real world.

I can't help thinking that all the effort that goes into things like this in the Free Software community, whilst appreciated in the current scenario, would be better spent somewhere else. But, until we are able to stop this kind of back-filling, we will always be held back.

There seems to be a lot going on in the world of DRM this week.

Firstly, the government has responded to a petition calling for DRM to be banned in the UK. Bizarrely, their response cites the protection of consumers' rights as a reason to plough ahead with allowing DRM in all sorts of legally bought media.

The BBC has also been thinking about whether and how to use DRM in its material, and is holding an on-line public consultation. There's a particularly good blog post about some of the implications of what they're asking here, so please do let them know what you think. The Financial Times is also running a poll on what people think of DRM here, which to date records a massive 98% of people against it.

The BBC one astounds me the most really. It seems to me that they're actually asking us (the British people) how much we think that they should restrict our rights to view and listen to stuff that we've already paid for (through the TV licence). To me, this is just cheeky. If TV and radio had not been invented with the idea of timed broadcasts, where things are just shown once, I wonder if any of this would have ever been an issue. Get real folks at the BBC, you're a public broadcaster. Just because the nature of broadcasting is changing, why should you artificially recreate the restrictions of previous broadcast technology?