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Music, downloads, copying, RIPPING, rights... it's all highly ambiguous. Where do you - or any of us - stand when it comes to ripping our CDs in iTunes and putting their contents onto an iPod?

In the closing months of 2006, we find ourselves in a legal no man's land. On the one hand it is, technically, illegal to copy CDs onto any kind of portable player. Yet on the other it's unlikely you would get in trouble for breaking that law. For the moment. Addressing a Commons Select Committee, BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson said back in June that his organisation, which represents music labels in the UK, wanted to 'make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs ... in order to move the music from format to format we will not pursue them'.

So, it'll turn a blind eye.

Yet this month, Universal chair Doug Morris has

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branded iPods 'just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it'. What prompted such a slur? A Universal/Microsoft deal that will see his label reap payments for every Zune media player Redmond ships.

As music consumers, we have been pushed around between various warring factions like this for too long now. We're treated almost as badly as the musicians themselves, who want to create music just as much as we want to hear it, and many of whom, I'm sure, would do what they do for the love of it, even without the untold riches it can bring.

So isn't it time this was taken out of the hands of the music industry completely? Let's toughen up the copyright laws if that's what they want, and put the whole thing in the hands of the police. Let's have some clear-cut rules that state once and for all whether or not we're breaking the law by listening to our music on a hard drive or memory chip rather than a physical CD.

The music industry has proved that it cannot be trusted to provide adequate guidance and leadership. Can we trust it to keep that blind eye half closed for ever? Maybe. Maybe not. Is it not possible that a new management might have the legislative equivalent of a cataract excision, and that eye won't be so blind any more?

We need laws to protect our iPods and other hardware investments, just as much as the music companies need laws to protect their digital rights. We need to know where we stand.