Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Two Australian students have been charged over music piracy offences, according to this story on Australian IT. It's short on details, but presumably they weren't running a P2P network. The maximum penalties for breaching copyright under Australian law is 5 years jail."

Yabada writes: "Here's an interesting assessment of the GPL from an Australian legal perspective. AustralianIT is running a story on the GPL from an Australian legal perspective (mainly to explain away some of the Craig Mundie FUD). The interesting thing to note is that even though the GPL may not fit Australian laws (specifically some of the exclusion clauses), its emphasis on rights and not specific licence terms enables the possibility of modification to suit local laws. Food for FSF thought."

dustpuppy writes: "The new Southern Cross Cable Network connecting Australia to the US is now operational. Featuring 120 Gigabit capacity and with a latency of 70 msec, the new trans-Pacific cable is 120 times the capacity of the existing Australasia/North America connection. Now us poor Aussies can download our mp3s that much faster! You can read more about it here." Interesting, too, how it's constructed. From the article: "The network consisted of two separate cables configured in three self-healing rings, with all three rings to be completed early next year. The duplicate-ring construction gave the network greater redundancy - if one side of the network was damaged or became inoperable, traffic could be transferred to the other side instantly." Neat.

Anonymous Coward writes "According to this story on The Australian IT site, the Australian Federal Government claims that its content regulation laws have "boosted Internet use in Australia", by assuring families of the safety of the Net. A quote: "When asked if the Government believed the laws had successfully removed all such [extremely offensive] content from the internet, a spokesman for Senator Alston replied: 'can you prove (that content) is still out there?'"

stylewagon writes "The Australian has an article about a project undertaken by the National Library of Australia's Electronic Unit. The project is called PANDORA [Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia]. In a nutshell, they've been archiving important local Web sites since 1997 at regular intervals, with the aim of preserving Australia's online history. Everything from old political campaign sites to online journals long gone are there for public viewing." This is a cool project; seems like a handy application of Doing Stuff over the temptation of Grander Schemes, which must be tempting indeed with the rash of "archive the Web" projects lately. I just wonder how posterity will view the selection process that determines which sites are considered "important" enough to archive. Remind anyone of Foundation?

David Waters writes: "The Australian Government has quickly decided on the future of digital streaming coming into Australia. Streamers will escape licencing laws." Here is the story, from Australian IT, which mentions in passing a fairly bald truth: "Had the Government decided to limit audio and video streaming, the development of Australia's high-speed internet industry [...] would have been severely curtailed." Errr ... yes. Yes, it would.

TheSync writes: "The Australian Broadcasting Company is report ing that the Australian government is considering whether Internet streaming video and audio should come under the definition of broadcasting, and thus be liable to licensing requirements by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Other articles on this issue can be found at TheAge.Com.au and Austra lia IT. This could lead to streaming licensing fees and possibly more censorship." Seems like the legislature believes that Australia should be an island unto itself, instead a well-connected island.

mge writes: "According to this story in some local Aussie IT pages, Nokia is looking for developers to make online games for mobile phones and it has established R&D centres in Helsinki, Belgrade and Sydney to provide content for the company's new mobile entertainment centre. There's a WAP Client Toolkit, Game Construction Toolkit, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), documentation and sample source code for applications to download. An Australian company, Fluffy Spider Technologies, is also offering assistance to game developers. They have posted free code online for a simple Tic Tac Toe game. Of course, they want games, but how about automated dial-ins (to take advantage of lower call/ISP rates), smart forms etc ... " Well someone needs to start giving all our smart phones something to think about, eh?

Codeine writes ""Technically it would appear they have complied with the law, in that it is not hosted here," Nugent said. "But to the end-user, it would appear that nothing has changed." And this is being described as a success by a government spokesperson. Check it out. "