It's now legal to rip CDs and DVDs for personal use

Like all good law-abiding citizens, you've no doubt been keeping those Limp Bizkit CDs on the shelf until the UK made it legal for you to copy them.

Well the great news is that, starting today, you can. It's now legal to copy CDs, DVDs and ebooks for your own personal use.

Creating a backup of personal media has been banned in the UK until now, meaning that, technically, ripping a CD to your iTunes was breaking the law - a rule you were all aware of and fully respected, of course.

But the UK government acknowledged that it was finally time to change this, and initially vowed to amend this in June. But Parliament was slow to push it through, which is why the change to UK copyright law is going live today.

Copy that floppy

However it adds that it is still unlawful to make copies for other people, or to copy something you haven't acquired legally yourself. That means no torrenting, and no ripping friends' CDs.

It also adds: "You are permitted to make personal copies to any device that you own, or a personal online storage medium, such as a private cloud. However, it is unlawful to give other people access to the copies you have made, including, for example, by allowing a friend to access your personal cloud storage."

Still, at least you can finally rip those CDs with peace of mind. A full overview of the changes can be found here.

• There's this new thing called Spotify and it doesn't even need CDs! Fancy that.