WRITTEN ON January 19th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Political engagement

What a pleasing answer from the 10 Downing Street team to the petition

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.”

It must have been a pleasure for the #10 people to be able to reply

As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced that there would be a review of the intellectual property framework in the UK, led by Andrew Gowers.

The findings of this review have now been published and recommend the introduction of a private copying exception for the purposes of format shifting. This would allow individuals to copy music which they have legally bought on compact disc onto an MP3 player without infringing copyright.

The Government welcomes this recommendation and is currently considering how such an exception should be created in UK law.

Hurrah for Gowers, teh MySoc petition team and for ORG.