The UK's music industry has successfully landed a significant judgement from the UK's High Court, countering a copyright exception that was brought in by the UK government last year. Since last October, there was a law that allowed you to make private copies of your own music; now the future of that law is uncertain.

The exception finally legalised what everyone has been doing for decades: making copies for personal, private use of copyright works they had bought, including format-shifted versions. Despite the marginal nature of the exception—it did not extend to making copies for family and friends, for example—the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, the Musicians’ Union, and UK Music successfully applied to the High Court for a judicial review of the change to UK law.

The UK government brought in the new copyright exception under a European Union directive that gives national governments that power, but which requires compensation to be paid to artists unless the harm caused to them by the change in copyright law is minimal. The UK government argued that by limiting the new exception to private copies, any harm caused to copyright holders was indeed negligible, and therefore did not need to be funded—for example through a levy charged on consumers of blank media (CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs etc.) and equipment (MP3 players, printers, PCs, etc.)—of the kind found in other EU countries with copyright exceptions.

The UK government offered two main arguments for its position. One was that most people had not been buying duplicates because they felt they had a right to make backup or format-shifted copies, even if the law said otherwise, and acted accordingly. Therefore, legalising what people already did would not cause any significant lost sales, and therefore no compensation was necessary.

The other argument offered by the UK government was that the copyright industries knew full well that everyone was making personal copies, and had already incorporated that fact in the pricing. So legalising those personal copies with a copyright exception would again not lead to any loss for the copyright holders, who were already obtaining compensation through slightly increased prices.

In the case before the High Court, the music groups claimed that the assumptions adopted by the UK government were both "legally and factually incorrect and flawed," and also challenged "the inferences and conclusions drawn from the evidence actually collected."

In general, the judge found for the UK government, except on one crucial point: he agreed that the UK government's decision to bring in the new copyright exception was "flawed" because "the evidence relied upon to justify the conclusion about harm was inadequate/manifestly inadequate."

This leaves three possibilities for the UK government. It could carry out further research to prove more rigorously that copyright holders will not suffer from the introduction of this personal copy exception, in which case the law could stand; it could repeal the relevant section; or it could introduce a compensation scheme. As the judge points out, "the next stage is for the parties to make submissions as to next steps," so that the status of the new exemption can be clarified.

What's noteworthy here is the degree of resistance to even the most trivial of copyright exceptions—one that simply legalises the status quo, rather than introducing any substantive change. The refusal to accept gracefully legislative changes is not new for the copyright industry. Perhaps the most egregious example of its dog-in-the-manger attitude was during negotiations for a global treaty to give the blind and visually impaired greater access to electronic texts. There, the proposal to allow them to circumvent DRM legally so that assistive technologies like Braille readers could be deployed was fiercely fought.

When preserving the sanctity of anti-circumvention measures is regarded as more important than enriching the lives of hundreds of millions of blind and visually impaired people around the world, it's perhaps no wonder that even the UK's mildest of copyrights exceptions ends up in the High Court.