Re: Still Waiting
The Government absolutely can take rights away. It's their prerogative as the UK's legislative body.
For a subset of those rights we defer to the EU and/or the ECHR however, such as in this case, where it's the Gov'ts job to argue that their legislation is allowed and/or challenge existing EU legislation.
And regardless on your opinions on format shifting, implementing a levy on copying media to "compensate" a limited group of people seems completely unjust, as it's a targeted tax on a media that may not even be used for the activities for which these people want to be compensated.
For example, in a hypothetical UK where such a levy is introduced, I would expect that if I used any such media to make a copy of a work that has waived its copyrights (for instance, any non-commercial copy of Linux, or any FOSS software), I shouldn't have to pay a levy, or I should be able to claim back against the levy. Also, I don't understand how the levy would really work, given that most writeable media these days can make multiple copies.
I'd be against a general fund that pays into the industry for copying "compensation" as this money will get caught up in middlemen and the current schemes these companies use tend to disproportionately favour bigger creators (though admittedly I'm basing this off testimony from The Indelicates from a few years back). I'd sooner have some kind of funding available through the UK arts and culture funding that is applied flatly to all artists for any of their works. That would act as an incentive to keep creating.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
