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Since when can someone search another person's property?

Quoting from this PDF, which is part of a report on enforcement of copyright in Australia by the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs for the Australian Parliament ...

It is not easy to secure evidence to support a civil action for infringement, especially an action against pirates or bootleggers, who often dissemble their operations at the threat of legal action. For this reason, the courts have developed an interlocutory order that enables a plaintiff to enter and search the defendant's premises, and seize infringing material. Failure to comply with the order constitutes contempt of court. The order is known as an Anton Piller order, after the case in which it was first granted.
...
Anton Piller orders, which are sought in an ex parte application to the court, are only granted if strict requirements are met. Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) stated that courts are reluctant to grant Anton Piller orders, and that they are in any case very expensive to seek. Preparation for an application for Anton Piller orders may involve surveillance and investigative and forensic activities. The orders are also very costly to execute, since an independent team of lawyers must be present.

The key issue here appears to be that copyright infringment is a civil offence and not a criminal one, so police will not involve themselves in search and seizure of evidence. The Anton Piller order allows the search for and seizure of evidence to occur in such cases. But it's not easy to get such an order (and you need to have evidence already) and independant witnesses must be present to ensure the integrity of any evidence found.

ACT is *the capital* city of Australia, seat of federal government, part time home of australian pollies (politicians), home of australian federal public service, houses adf hq (moved from vic barracks in melbourne - my home), home of various australian intelligence agencies (asis, asio) , location for diplomatic embassies, etc. Also home of Australian National University, Andrew Tridgell of Samba and rsync fame.

Canberra is *not underfunded*. It is in a sense an *artifical* city created as a political compromise to house the australian capital - after a fight broke betweem Victoria and Sydney around federation around 1901. The solution Canberra, a territory created in the NSW outback. Its sole purpose it to house government and its associated functions.

as for being less influential ... in australia its the national capital and houses the federal government - q.e.d. As for the rest of the world ... what does it matter?

I rather doubt it's in the constitution, though you're certainly welcome to look.

Remember, this is AUSTRALIA we're talking about. Judges tend to be somewhat... liberal in their rulings insofar as the rights of the citizen over the corporation go.

At one stage, on finding that a tobacco company had destroyed most of the internal documentation sought by the plaintif as a precautionary move against lawsuits, the judge simply declined to allow the defence to give their case.

Pity that was overturned on appeal though.

1,500,000.00 AUD = 1,057,049.72 USD.

A million dollars in Australia is still a lot of money in anyone's language.

The average wage in Australia in 1999-2000 was $33350 p.a.. So someone with a million bucks can do quite well for themselves if they invest sensibly.

This guy has managed to make himself a nice little living out of his scams.

The Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000 is not entirely disimilar from the DMCA.

A copy of the Parliamentary Library's Bills Digest (crib notes for parliamentarians who are not lawyers is here for the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999

Now I've found that I'm gonna keep it really busy. Hell, let's introduce the P.M. to the slashdot effect!

Quoth Kindaian:

It is illegal to change the copyright of ALREADY published works. Check contractual law for details and see if one part can unilaterally change the terms of the contract...

That is utter rubbish. Copyright is a statutory scheme. Copyright is not a contract between anyone. When people talk about contractual theories of copyright they are talking about justifications of copyright law based on an exchange: copyright protection in return for the author going to the effort of producing the work. This does not mean that as a matter of law copyright is a contract.

Since copyright is a statutory scheme, the parliament can change it by passing a law.

Incidentally, before some clueless Yank steps in and starts talking about "limited times". The Australian parliament's copyright power is set out in s51.(xviii.) of the constitution:

51.The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to: - ... (xviii.) Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks:

Not true. Check his bio. He's 61 now. It's not surprising he didn't want to stay in Parliament much longer. Australian politicians (unlike their American counterparts) tend to retire close to the community retirement age, if not earlier.

Often a retiring politician will find outside employment in areas such as public speaking, non-executive board membership, diplomacy, or in the case of Alston he may want to return to the Bar.

I'm an Aussie, too.

Senator Alston may not be the greatest **computer** intellectual, but let's be fair. Who writes this stuff? He does not invent policy or Bill text himself.

Someone in these places is doing it:
- Department of Communications, IT and the Arts http://www.dcita.gov.au (e.g. Networking the Nation http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-3_461-4 _106337,00.html)
- National Office for the Information Economy http://www.noie.gov.au/
- Treasury's e-commerce office http://www.ecommerce.treasury.gov.au/
- somewhere else in the Australian Federal Government http://www.fed.gov.au

Yet, the semi-Westminster form of Government we operate under in Australia both appluads and blames the Minister responsible. Sen. Richard Alston

Offensive behaveyor. LEts see, that means i can have all religious sites off the internet, as they offend me.

Actually, religious sites are probably one of the few categories that this law couldn't cover, since under section 116 of the Australian Constitution, the Commonwealth is not allowed to prohibit the free exercise of any religion.

Obviously that is already provided here:

http://www.budget.gov.au/

and here:

http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/estimates/index.htm

I mean, honestly, who doesn't know that governments produce "Budgets" ?!?!?

Well... try it without the space. It worked for me. Just in case, here it is.

David Hicks
Mamdouh Habib

This is in spite of calls by the Australian Senate for their release.

I believe that New Zealand still retains some degree of self-respect.

http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/senators/homepages/we b/s-LD4.htm

But with compulsory voting, , strong opposition [yes, I know that the democrats are dead] leading to the upper house hobbling the lower house this isn't going to get very far. Never mind. Thank god for three year terms of office, that's what I say.

But with compulsory voting, , strong opposition [yes, I know that the democrats are dead] leading to the upper house hobbling the lower house this isn't going to get very far. Never mind. Thank god for three year terms of office, that's what I say.

So, my vote helps determine whether John gets to even be in parliament next election, much less PM. As such, I have at some level or another greater access to influence John than the rest of the Australian population.

However, all I see in this thread are rantings: "this sucks", "Australia is the US' bitch", etc. While these point may (or may not) be true, they are hardly convincing arguments.

So, if you were in my place, what would you say to your local member of parliament AKA the Prime Minister?

(Only rational responses need apply.)

http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/mplist.htm

There are several party-independent mebers of US Congress and many more at the state and local levels. This is a legal impossibility in most Euroepan countries (as well as other democracies around the world, such as Australia).

No party-independent parliamentary members in Australia?

I don't know that I would exactly say that...

Admittedly, the majority of them are total fruit loops, but hey, someone voted for them.

There are several party-independent mebers of US Congress and many more at the state and local levels. This is a legal impossibility in most Euroepan countries (as well as other democracies around the world, such as Australia).

No party-independent parliamentary members in Australia?

I don't know that I would exactly say that...

Admittedly, the majority of them are total fruit loops, but hey, someone voted for them.

There are several party-independent mebers of US Congress and many more at the state and local levels. This is a legal impossibility in most Euroepan countries (as well as other democracies around the world, such as Australia).

No party-independent parliamentary members in Australia?

I don't know that I would exactly say that...

Admittedly, the majority of them are total fruit loops, but hey, someone voted for them.

There are several party-independent mebers of US Congress and many more at the state and local levels. This is a legal impossibility in most Euroepan countries (as well as other democracies around the world, such as Australia).

No party-independent parliamentary members in Australia?

I don't know that I would exactly say that...

Admittedly, the majority of them are total fruit loops, but hey, someone voted for them.

There are several party-independent mebers of US Congress and many more at the state and local levels. This is a legal impossibility in most Euroepan countries (as well as other democracies around the world, such as Australia).

No party-independent parliamentary members in Australia?

I don't know that I would exactly say that...

Admittedly, the majority of them are total fruit loops, but hey, someone voted for them.

There are several party-independent mebers of US Congress and many more at the state and local levels. This is a legal impossibility in most Euroepan countries (as well as other democracies around the world, such as Australia).

No party-independent parliamentary members in Australia?

I don't know that I would exactly say that...

Admittedly, the majority of them are total fruit loops, but hey, someone voted for them.

Average amount of cable required per remote rural subscriber in Australia is about 30 km. That's the average. Many people in the Outback have their nearest neighbour over 100 miles away. 97% of the population lives in 13% of the area (source). So we're talking about 600,000 people - at most 200,000 subscribers - in an area equivalent to the USA, less Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.
Existing LEOSats, such as Iridium and Globalstar can't even do 56kbps. But the Ka-band - if it works - may be enough to do 2 Gbps. That's what the experimental communications payload is for, amongst other things, to see how well or how badly Ka-band works over rural Australia (and also in built-up areas for other applications)

Correct.

Although New Zealand was the first country in the world to accord the vote to women in 1893, South Australia led the world in not only enfranchising women in 1894 but also making them eligible to sit in Parliament. By 1909 all Australian States and the Commonwealth had enfranchised most women (see table). Property qualifications applied initially for some upper houses. Federally, Aboriginal women (and men) were not accorded the vote until 1962 and even then enrolment provisions limited their electoral participation.

stolen from here

Senator NETTLE -- Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. I thank the minister for his answer and I am sure that he will be able to pursue that further. Could the minister assure the Senate that the government will not be using the horrendous events that happened on the weekend as an excuse to justify a further crackdown on civil liberties in Australia?
Senator HILL -- We certainly will not crack down on civil liberties, but we do believe that, in effectively responding to terrorism, there is sometimes a need for us all to accept that the extent of our traditional freedoms needs to be modified in these circumstances. That is why we have put legislation before this parliament which has that effect. We seek to do no more to modify those traditional liberties than is absolutely necessary to attack this terrorist threat, but if ever we need an example and illustration of how real this threat is we have had it in the last few days. We must do everything possible to effectively respond to it and to protect our people.

So basically the mythical blacklist exists but can do nothing to us. No one ever checks that the filtering software is on.

Normally ISPs are meant to use filtering software but consumers can opt out of it if they use their own filters. There are no real approved filters, none that I know of. The only filter I use is my mind. Mainly to watch out for the link traps on ./

The reason this is happening is the government is too gutless to legislate real laws. Instead it trys to appease the conservatives with laws that sound good on paper but don't work in reality. In particular this man is responsible

Brian Harradine, Senator for Tasmania

Sen Harradine is one of those people who hold power in the senate. Because he is not with either of the major factions they need to bribe him with his legislation to get their legislation passed. Basically he is not a problem because the major political parties Labour and Liberal dance around his silly issues.

Here is some of Harradine's first speech.

I was committed to uplifting the poor, to championing the cause of the underprivileged - not only in this country but also in the developing countries to our near north - and to representing the aspirations of the workers.

And

Why was all that pressure exercised? Because almost 10 years ago I declared that the friends of the communists were attempting to silence me. The friends of the communists have never silenced me and I do not intend to be silenced by them in this chamber.

I don't live in his electorate.

As the DCA page linked to points out, the inquiry will be given specific terms of reference to address. Your submission should therefore address what points you think are relevant to those terms of reference. It seems the most relevant to you would be:

* The potential for wireless broadband technologies to provide a 'last mile' broadband solution, particularly in rural and regional areas, and to encourage the development and use of broadband content applications; and

Since there will probably be expert groups and witnesses covering the technological aspects covered in the terms of reference, I suggest you stick to those two (plus any other policy-related terms I haven't mentioned). The economics of bandwidth distribution and the importance of not concentrating supply in a few major players are also important points.

Not having done this before myself, I would suggest you try and find any info about drafting submissions, appearing as a witness, procedure, etc, on the Parliamentary website. You may also wish to talk to a lawyer about any legal issues that you may wish to address (plus, a good lawyer is excellent at drafting arguments in the best way possible). Try and get in touch with various advocacy groups which may be interested and have done this sort of thing before in a related area, like EFA.

Good luck, it's in everybody's interests that wireless broadband be as widely available as possible, IMO, so I wish you all the best.

http://www.2600.org.au/cybercrime-bill-response.tx t

There's also a Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee inquiry into the legislation, at:

http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/legcon_ctte /cybercrimebill01/cybercrime.htm

2600 Australia will be making a submission to this committee. If you'd like to discuss this legislation prior to our submission (which must be lodged by the 20th of July), please join the 2600-law mailing list, by sending an empty email to 2600-law-subscribe@wiretapped.net. There are also public hearings in Sydney on 19th July and in Canberra on 9th August.

The bill doesn't make any of the things listed in this article illegal on their own - you have to be using them for, or intending to use them for, committing another federal crime. There is no requirement to divulge passwords, just to assist law enforcement in effecting the execution of a warrant. Without this they'll just seize the equipment anyway, so it's actually in the interests of the person owning the equipment to provide this assistance as it allows them to take just the relevant data.

Of course it does sound a lot more interesting to say it bans the posession of tools that are being used for legal purposes, but the bill explicitly mentions that there must be a use for, or an intent to use for, an otherwise illegal activity.

For those who are interested, the full text of the bill can be found here. (Junkbuster users: it requires cookies to be enabled in your browser.)

You can read the Full Text and an Explanatory Memo from the Australian Parliament Legislation page.

You can read the Full Text and an Explanatory Memo from the Australian Parliament Legislation page.

You can read the Full Text and an Explanatory Memo from the Australian Parliament Legislation page.

that link doesnt work, it's a search that has expired. Try this instead: http://search.aph.gov.au/search/ParlInfo.ASP?actio n=browse&Path=Legislation/Current+Bills+by+Title/C ybercrime+Bill+2001&Start=4&8cD#top
also there is some more stuff on http://www.2600.org.au/

Okay, from my reading of the Bill (PDF), it seems that the new offence is possession with intent (Schedule 1 lists the relevant amendments to the Criminal Code, you're looking for Part 10.7, Division 478.3). Means they have to prove you were going to commit a crime with the tool. It's a bit hard to prove that a sys admin who uses a particular tool for legit purposes was going to commit a crime.

As a matter of fact, given the legitimate usefulness of most 'cracker' tools, it seems that it would be quite difficult to prove that anyone was going to commit a crime unless you had a smoking-gun e-mail or other clear evidence of intent.

Jacinta Collins is noisy enough that you would have heard of her if you ever read a newspaper.

How about you look at the federal government site?

Sure the article described her as "Victorian Labor Senator Jacinta Collins", which is a little ambiguous. In this instance, they meant "Senator for Victoria", not "Member of the Legislative Assembly in Victoria" nor even "Labor Senator during Queen Victoria's reign".

Complaining about spam requires forwarding the entire message with complete headers. I haven't had a chance to read the bill yet - it was introduced and went through the committees in 1999 - but it looks like this bill may make spam complaints illegal.

What I'd like to know is, what were EFA doing at the time? The bill was titled "Copyright Ammendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999", yet EFA is not listed in the submissions to the committee inquiry. A bill like that screams out as being right down EFA's alley, and this interaction, which seems obscure to most people, would be blindingly obvious to EFA. It looks like they seriously dropped the ball as far as keeping in touch with what the Parliament was doing here.

The Australian law isn't quite as bad as the DMCA. For example:

While making and importing decoding devices will be banned, their personal use will not.

In other words, if you can get your hands on a device, you are allowed to use it

The full text of the modifications to the copyright bill can be found here and contain some interesting definitions which make the whole DeCSS thing quite different in Australia:

circumvention device means a device (including a computer program) having only a limited commercially significant purpose or use, or no such purpose or use, other than the circumvention, or facilitating the circumvention, of an effective technological protection measure

Under that definition, the DeCSS code itself is definitely illegal, but any Linux DVD player is fine because it definitely has a purpose other than simple decryption of the video data. Basically while this bill is still an impediment to the free trade of ideas, I think there is enough restraint in it to make some worthwhile things come out. Hopefully this means that while decss.c might be outlawed, css-auth.c is quite ok.

The Second Reading Speech (which has legal bearing on the spirit of the law) is here

For what its worth the Bill was before the Parliament for nearly a year.

It was certainly discussed in legal publishing circles (which are heavily effected as the government is messing around as a copyright holder of legislation)

However the so called "house of review" the Senate seemed to push it though without even looking at it. meaning no-one had objected strongly as it usually only takes one senator to refer a bill to committee (unless the government can get majority support of a guillotine which is rare)

The Bill and its explanatory material are here

You gotta be patient while the page loads.

Broadband in Australia is actually pretty darn good. For a fee about twice that of a good dial-up service, you can get fast cable internet which is not heavily restricted (considering we don't have uberpipes to America fully running yet).

Both major cable services let you download a few hundred megs per day without worry -- a pretty sweet deal imho. Optus@Home is not download capped, but is upload capped at 8k/sec. Big Pond Broadband's 'Freedom' plan is capped at 64k/sec(16k/sec up), which is still pretty good.

There are also various ADSL and sattelite services running.

As an Australian, I'm pretty darn satisfied with our broadband availability. You can check out my site here: http://whirlpool.net.au

On a not-so-related note, here is an article of mine that got rejected recently:
-----------

In late 1999, the Federal Parliament of Australia passed a piece of legislature, widely touted as the 'internet censorship bill'. One year later, it has been interesting to see what this bill has achieved: aside from a couple of locally hosted porn sites moving overseas, not much at all. Recently, the Australian Broadcasting Authority (the body responsible for implementing this bill) has acted on a number of complaints from users about various newsgroups, particularly those involving child pornography. Satisfied that the content is locally hosted, it has used this bill to issue a final take-down notice against Australia's largest ISP and phone co, Telstra. This has garnered a mixed reaction from Australian net users.

----------

--

And finally, China

I was just looking at what we have done here in Australia, and it appears that a circumvention device is legal providing it is to be used for permitted purposes, which include interoperability, and non copyright infringing acts. see here
It also allows for people to make copies for backups, and allows libraries to store electronic material and make copies.

Given how bloody awful this law could be, it's not looking all that bad so far. In particular, I believe that, should the changes recommended by the reviewing committee be accepted, it should be perfectly legal to distribute open source DVD playing software. Consider the following extract from the report (paragraph 4.25).

The Committee recommends that the meaning of circumvention device in item 4 of the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999 be amended to specifically include devices whose primary purpose or use is the circumvention, or facilitating the circumvention, of an effective technological protection measure, and devices which are promoted, advertised, or marketed as having the purpose of circumventing an effective technological protection measure.

Although an open source DVD playing program could conceptually be used to circumvent the "technological prevention measures" (because the code for decrypting the image data must exist in the program somewhere), but so long as the primary purpose of the program as written is to facilitate the viewing of a DVD (ie, it's a DVD player, and that's all), then the program should be allowed under the proposed law.

On the whole, the most interesting part of the report is the chapter from which I have quoted (chapter 4). It is available in PDF.

Amazon's privacy policy is in fact such a good example of the shocking state of privacy policies it has been used as an example of bad privacy policies in submissions to Australian Parliamentary Committees (see pages 8 and 14).

The typical privacy policy these days is designed to try to assure you you have some privacy, but to state that in fact you have none.

Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999

I admit, I don't understand why the Austrlian parliament would do this.

As mentioned, no NRA. The right to bear arms such as it is in the US has no equivalent in the Australian constitution (a formal document) nor the constitutions of the states of Australia (usually not formal documents).

This bill allows the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to enter, modify, delete or copy data as well as disabling any cryptography one may be running, in order to make it easier for them to get future data. Despite the Attorney General, Daryl William's reassurances that the legislation was "designed to ensure an appropriate balance between individual privacy and the public interest in effective law enforcement and national security;" and that an access warrant is required in these cases, I am fearful of the abuses that are bound to follow. Under this act, ASIO will be allowed to cover up the fact that they hacked into the system and will not be subject to the Crimes Act that forbids computer hacking in Australia surely raising the possibility of framing dissenters and now under the auspices of business, perhaps conduct industrial espionage.

Have these recent laws been instituted in order to legitimise hacking by the Australian Government and pave the way for the legal usage of Echelon by the Australian government? Is there some greater conspiracy I am failing to foresee? I hope not, otherwise my future civil liberties online are already under great jeopardy.