Backing up is now illegal

The decision of the High Court to make it illegal again to rip a CD you've purchased for money to play on a device of your choosing we've covered before. There's another sting to the judgement, though, as Consequence Of Sound have discovered. If you store your legally purchased music on your computer, and you back up your hard drive, you're a criminal, chummy:

the Government spokesperson went on to add that, “… It includes creating back-ups without permission from the copyright holder as this necessarily involves an act of copying.” In other words, if you legally purchase digital media online, you are now not legally allowed to back up that information on an external hard drive of any sort. In the long run, that means if your computer were to crash or get stolen, your only allowable course of action would be to re-purchase all your music and movies.

(I'm sure Apple and Amazon would both point out that if you buy through them, your purchase is recorded and free to download again at any time.)

Backing up your computer is now illegal. Good work, everybody.