[euyyn]

Not being able to enforce a specific aspect of copyright law led in the 80's to pretty much all countries having to reform their laws.

When home VCRs became commonplace, creating an automatic copy of a broadcast was still illegal. Some German high court ruled that people's right to privacy in their own homes trumped law enforcement's interest in enforcing copyright, so the law was unenforceable in those cases. Hence was born the exemption for "copies for private use", and the related "tax" applied to sales of VCRs (and later on, blank CDs and DVDs) that was used to pay off author associations.