A guest post from Dan Bull:

This week, I made a parody music video criticising Lord Finesse for being a copyright draconian. Guess what. He had my video pulled down, claiming it infringed his copyright. Which proves my point more than anything I could have said myself. Techdirt has written an article on the issue here.

Today’s copyright legislation is out of balance, and out of tune with the times. It has turned an entire generation of young people into criminals in the eyes of the law, in a futile attempt at stopping technological development. Yet file sharing has continued to grow exponentially. Neither propaganda, fear tactics, nor ever harsher laws have been able to stop the development. It is impossible to enforce the ban against non-commercial file sharing without infringing on fundamental human rights. As long as there are ways for citizens to communicate in private, they will be used to share copyrighted materials. The only way to even try to limit file sharing is to remove the right to private communication. In the last decade, this is the direction that copyright enforcement legislation has moved in, under pressure from big business lobbyists who see their monopolies under threat. We need to reverse this trend to safeguard fundamental rights.

In the last week there have been three stories in the news concerning copyright infringement and "illegal websites". In each case, a group with an interest in enforcing copyright has called for or announced measures against such websites, but this raises an important question of what makes a website illegal. In terms of copyright infringement this is a very tricky question as there is no easy way to tell whether content or a service is unlawful.

Format-shifting, space-shifting and time-shifting are curious oddities of copyright law. Two of these three are currently illegal in the UK, all are routinely done by thousands, if not millions of people across the country. While many of these people are merely unaware what they are doing it illegal, very few view it as wrong.

The BPI announced their latest report on digital music sales and "piracy", entitled Digital Music Nation 2010. As usual, it consists of a careful mix of truth, lies, delicately chosen misleading statistics and precisely spun industry snapshots.  TorrentFreak have published some initial analysis. While we go through the report with a fine-toothed comb and a magnifying glass to try and figure out what's really going on, my take on the situation can be found after the cut.