Legality of the products

There are two issues when it comes to recording: is the piece of equipment legal purely as a piece of electronic equipment, and is it legal to use it to record telephone calls.

Legality as a piece of electronic equipment

The equipment that we sell is all CE marked to comply with European legislation for safety and electromagnetic emissions and immunity.
Part of this law is that the user should be protected from any potentially dangerous voltages. It is considered that the telephone line can have dangerous voltage from which the public needs to be protected. All of the connectors that we supply have an electronic "barrier" inside that is designed to meet the specification of protecting the user from 1000V for 1 minute. If you buy telephone connectors from Patrick Brothers, Phonapart or Maxview in stores such as Maplin be aware that they can either contain no barrier at all, or a barrier that will not withstand the specified voltages. This is legal due to a quirk in the law that they are not sold as a complete telephone recording kit, only as a connecting cable and you, as the consumer, make the combination of the recording connector and some other taperecorder. It would not be legal to sell these recording connectors with a taperecorder as a combination, or at least not without warnings on all the relevant parts about not touching any metal which would connect you to the potentially dangerous telephone line.

Legality to use the equipment to record telephone calls.

This is dealt with in the other pages in this section, which we have split into:

• recording customers
• recording employees
• recording at home