The United Kingdom will update its copyright laws to make it legal for users to make backups of ebooks, music and movies they own. Also conversion to others formats and storing media in the cloud should be legalized this way.
The new law should become in effect in June 2014 and the UK Intellectual Property Office has published a brochure covering the changes. Currently it's illegal in the UK to make personal copies or to convert media to another format for use on e.g. tablets or mobile phones.
The new law makes a strict different between personal usage and copying for friends and families, the latter is still forbidden. Only purchased content can be converted or copied or stored in the cloud and only for personal use. Making copies of CDs for your friends, copying CDs borrowed from friends, or copying videos illegally downloaded from file-sharing websites is still prohibited.
Also copy-protections are specifically mentioned. On this the brochure states, "media such as DVDs are often protected by anti-copying technology to guard against copyright piracy, and this is protected by law. Copyright owners will still be able to apply this protection. However, if copy protection is too restrictive, you may raise a complaint with the Secretary of State."
The brochure unfortunately doesn't cover whether circumventing copy protections to make it possible to make a backup is now legal.
Which would be interesting in the light of the recent DVDFab events. The company is legally chased by the AACS-LA an US company which licenses the Blu-ray copy protection and wants to shut down DVDFab for circumventing their copy protection technology.
