Good to see they are on the ball, never mind the fact we were all doing long before CD’s & MP3’s came about, recording the radio on to cassettes (yes I’m old enough to remember cassettes) and what about VHS recorders and the modern day equivalent SKY+ and V+ from Virgin. #ASAFAIL

Spot on m1kesy. Mistake corrected. Coffee machine rebooted.

Barry Collins
Editor

Is this something PCPro could take a keen interest in going forward by consulting with the ASA and finding out what their position is concerning how this is different from itunes, media player, etc.

I would be very interested in the position they take.

Hmmm, I feel the need to hand myself in to the police, or at the very least, tie myself to a tree and flog myself with stinging nettles. I have been “backing up” vinyl and CD phonographic recordings for the last 30 years!!!
Anyone got the number of a good lawyer?

I think we should applaud the ASA for doing this small company’s marketing for them. I may just buy one…

Of course, I shall be be applying to the copyright holder of each CD I own individually for permission: probably using my swan quill and stretched vellum to make it official, and appropriate to the century in which they seem to imagine they live…

@ Thomas Bennett – find me a advert for it…

It’s a stupid ruling with a small silver lining. I am oh so fed up with seeing full page ads for the Brennan (and especially pictures of the bearded guy) in just about every issue of every weekly magazine I subscribe to.

The box looks a bit like the Empeg car music players from a few years back.

Nick – the official line from the music industry is that personal format shifting is OK. There’s never been a case over it, and there never will be, and the ASA – which has nothing to do with the music industry – is stepping outside its remit here. Unless it is, as some have suggested, a publicity stunt.

On the other hand, what is ‘illegal’ is to rip a CD and then sell the original on, or give it away – because in that case you’re effectively ‘bootlegging’ (on a small scale). You have given away the copyright that you purchased.

And that’s really what that wording is about – ‘you have not bought the commercial rights to make and distribute additional copies of this work, whether physical or electronic’.

Taken literally, that does include ‘back-ups’ – but there has never been a case against personal format shifting (even to tape). It turns out that the music industry contains many people who had Walkmen and have MP3 players.

(The unofficial rule is basically ‘if someone in your household has the original, it’s fine).

Also it’s all really contract law – terms and conditions, rather than The Law.
(The DMCA, on the other hand, is The Law).

Is it that the ASA is a dinosaur that acts most readily when it sees something in print?

Surely this breaks exactly the same rules as the Brennan, and doesn’t seem at all tacit:

http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/features/#importing

I have a Sony CMT-HX80R (cheap DAB/CD/iPod/USB audio player). It has no internal storage however it will rip an audio cd to a USB stick if I want. In other words one of its “features” is specifically designed to break the law. Oh dear, will I get hung drawn and quartered ( I think I have only used it once for that purpose).

Tosh, tosh & more tosh. Where do these people live who come up with these things. There must be literally 100’s of devices that promote themselves as being able to store your music in a similar fashion. I’ve just finished putting all my vinyl, cassette & Cd’s onto MP3 so I can store the originals in the loft without cluttering up our living space. I and hundreds of thousands & possibly millions have done this. No wonder the media business is in mess they really haven’t got to grips with the new world of digital storage.

The Brennan is a really useful little product,unique and much loved by its owners, that delivers a great service. The ASA costs us taxpayers millions of pounds every year, doesn’t do much worthwhile and every now and then makes a complete a**e of itself. Keep Brennan. Lose the ASA.

@David Bath

“Lose the ASA”

Yer, then advertisers can place unlawful, misleading and indecent adverts. Woo! Better all round.

Or maybe we could just throw out the bathwater and hang onto the baby.

“The ASA costs us taxpayers millions of pounds every year, doesn’t do much worthwhile”

The ASA is completely funded by the advertising industry BTW, and resolved nearly 29,000 complaints in 2009.

http://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Annual-Report.aspx

It’s the law on format-shifting that’s the problem, not the ASA.

And those Brennan ads annoy me with their pics of Brennan and his dreary list of academic credentials!

There’s an old saying. Any publicity is good publicity, even when it’s bad publicity. Now I’ve read the bad publicity on this device, I want one! Congrats to the ASA for helping publicise this nifty little device:-) Knowing about the ASA’s tactics could be a boon for any company wanting to sell similar products, they could save a fortune on advertising.

One thing the ASA could do with stepping on is misleading adverts on the web. These are either adverts that are designed to look like part of the hosting page’s user interface such you click on them not the button you should have clicked on.

Some examples include buttons claiming to start a download on a site like SourceForge. Sourceforge starts the download automatically, so has no download button of its own. Also Facebook on which a banner advert claimed that my friendless test account had messages from 3 friends.

Another type of advert seen on Facebook is one that takes you somewhere completely irrelevant to the thing you clicked on.

Such adverts are deliberately underhand and should be a target of the ASA.

Oh dear I have just loaded 30 CD to my Toyota Hard drive. Must go & delete them !!!!!!!!!

I’m a bit late to the discussion here, but I would like to point out that my old xbox does exactly the same as this CD player/ripper (as do xbox 360)