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You know what, you're right! That $5000 spread across every Australian customer definitely does equate to 50% more per copy!

http://www.classification.gov.au/Industry/Journey/Pages/CGnonA/Step3.aspx

I'm not talking about games that would be rated R18. I'm talking about games whose (smaller) publishers have not paid the Australian Classification Board to rate them, even if they would have ended up rated G or PG.

The article is also, not talking about these games.

Why does the latest Gears of Bore or Call of Halo cost 3 to 4 times as much in Australia, legally sold from Australian retail stores under Australian laws WITH AUSTRALIAN RATINGS than the exact same games in Europe or the United States (which it is 100% LEGAL TO IMPORT).

But nice try to dance around the point of price disparity for exactly the same product and grasp upon ideas that are not only horribly out of date but also incorrect (the laws do not prohibit importing of "non classified" or "have not paid the classification board", they only prohibit SPECIFIC banned items of which there is a clear, well published and well defined list, wikipedia can help you here).

As I said, nice try to get away from the point but what bearing does this bit of superfluous and wrong information have to do with the fact games for Australian customers ARE MANY TIMES THE PRICE OF OTHER COUNTRIES.

Do you get the piont, yes I know you're a bit slow on the uptake but I've put them in bold and CAPITAL LETTERS.

I'm not talking about games that would be rated R18. I'm talking about games whose (smaller) publishers have not paid the Australian Classification Board to rate them, even if they would have ended up rated G or PG.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification (a statutory authority set up by legislation, though not strictly part of 'the government') does it.

Max Payne was released in Australia unedited. It was rated MA15+

So no, it is not that simple or stupid.

That's because Australia requires classification of all video games for socially objectionable elements, and the XBLIG business model cannot afford to pay the Australian Classification Board $2,040 per title. If you want to play unrated games, you could try becoming a skilled worker.

Do you mean the secret cabal that oversees ratings in Australia? That the members of the ratings board are secret? That the guidelines they use to determine classification are secret? That their review decisions are secret?

Or are you just pissed that they make decisions without asking you?

Do you mean the secret cabal that oversees ratings in Australia? That the members of the ratings board are secret? That the guidelines they use to determine classification are secret? That their review decisions are secret?

Or are you just pissed that they make decisions without asking you?

Do you mean the secret cabal that oversees ratings in Australia? That the members of the ratings board are secret? That the guidelines they use to determine classification are secret? That their review decisions are secret?

Or are you just pissed that they make decisions without asking you?

Do you mean the secret cabal that oversees ratings in Australia? That the members of the ratings board are secret? That the guidelines they use to determine classification are secret? That their review decisions are secret?

Or are you just pissed that they make decisions without asking you?

Yeah, because under 200 some jobs is worth the...how much are you guys investing in this again?

$43 billion. But what makes you think that the only benefit will be 200 jobs? This is a massive undertaking, which will have massive consequences.

And isn't this the same country that had a lone ISP that ran your internet for years? Or was it DNS, I forget. Then you had some sorry ass links to the outside world because of this...

You might be thinking of Melbourne IT, which was responsible for the .com.au addresses. One person handled the entire registration process for the entire country. This was much more complicated than getting a .com address because you had to provide documentation to prove you had the company name to match the address. Back in the 90s it ended up with a massive backlog. But this didn't affect the ability to connect to the Internet.

You might also be thinking of Telstra. It is true that Telstra resells their ADSL as a wholesaler, which was quite proper. However, they also are a public ISP and this creates a conflict of interest. The big problem that we had with Telstra in this respect was that it was privatised at about the time the Internet was becoming popular. It should have been broken up before privatisation so that they would not be in competition with their own resellers. Even worse, they were in competition with themselves. I remember many years ago when we wanted to use Internet access over mobile phones (long before 3G). We could get a cheaper price at Telstra if we asked at a different department. It was way too massive.

The ideal would have been to keep the wholesaler in government hands and sell off the retailer parts. This is exactly what the NBN is going to fix.

And nowadays, you have some ridiculous on and offline censorship. Video games.

I have a lot of issues with the Australian Classification Board. But I don't see how this is relevant to this topic.

And aren't you the folks that has a hit list, sorry, morality blacklist of unacceptable web sites, with lone government oversight, thanks to your governments and population's newfound "morality"?

No. Apart from a trial of a few ISPs (now over), it has never been implemented. And I doubt it ever will. There was always going to be too large a backlash.

So chalk up one for you with an IBM research center. Good for you. They smelled the dollars, and came running. When it runs out, they'll leave.

So what? Don't ever try anything because things might change in the future? Seriously, what is the point of your rambling?

Furthermore Australia has not had the best record of transparency regarding censorship either. For example, 9 Songs was given permission for screening but Comstock Films' documentaries were not, despite those documentaries winning awards (both contain graphic, explicit sexual content). Given that the government won't let citizens see what they are banning, what makes you confident that this won't be exercised in arbitrary ways?

Untrue. The classification board publish all of the classifications and reasons for the classification applied (or classification refused)

Now if material is "refused classification", that's slightly different. That then becomes a matter of state law

Not just state law. The Classification Board and Classification Review Board act under the aegis of the Federal Attorney General's Dept. But yes, the states are free to enact their own control regimes.

This IS censorship, and the whole idea of refusing a work classification is offensive. This is material which hasn't broken any laws, but which has been deemed offensive by a review board.

Not so. The refusal of classification has to be made on strictly legal grounds. Either the material has broken laws (by depicting violent sexuality, promoting drug use &tc.), or the decision of the Board is wrong. And the classification scheme is, as you say above, but in regard to prohibited material, "subject to public oversight." Conroy's secret censorship proposal would (dare I still use the modal verb) not be!

Now I happen to think that the legal criteria for restriction are misguided, (I don't actually feel threatened by pot-smoking BDSMers), but that's a different question from the offensiveness of refusing classification per se.

The empirical evidence from the current regime is that where a game is refused classification, the publisher will almost always make the necessary alterations (toning down certain amounts of gore etc) in order to achieve an MA15+ rating. The current system has thus been reasonably effective -- ensuring that games are made suitable for a 15+ audience, and given that anyone in the 15-18 category is unlikely to be prevented from accessing a title simply by its having a higher rating that is a defensible approach (by which I mean "there is an argument for it" not "it is the correct approach").

True, in most cases the publisher has altered their game to get the MA15+ rating - but not in all cases.

Additionally, games that have been rated higher in other countries have been rated MA15+ in Australia because we have no higher rating. This I don't personally mind, but it suggests our rating system is flawed.

But I find the biggest hypocricy is in its present state, our ratings system for games doesn't even pass the first guiding principle of the Australian Classification Code;

"adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want"

Gamers for Croyden are a new political party just set up and hopefully they'll get a few votes in Michael Atkinson's seat. They may not change his mind, but hopefully they can spread the word

So if what Conroy has announced here goes ahead, a whole pile of product pages at Amazon (among others) are going to have to go on the blacklist. (Leisure Suit Larry is among the games banned in Australia.

The problem is that many of the proposed filtering solutions work by routing traffic to IP addresses that host prohibited pages to a proxy server. As we saw with the Internet Watch/BT/Wikipedia debacle, this approach is likely to cause problems with high traffic sites (and may well overload the proxy server).

Danny.

You say this like it's a new thing. The Classification Board has been censoring stuff for decades.

Firstly - woot, Fallout 3.

Secondly, banned for drugs: http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2008/07/olfc_report_why_fallout_3_was_banned_in_australia.html

Has now been re-rated, and is ok: http://www.classification.gov.au/special.html?n=46&p=156&sTitle=Fallout+3&sMediaFilm=1&sMediaPublications=1&sMediaGames=1&sDateFromM=1&sDateFromY=1970&sDateToM=8&sDateToY=2008&record=229214

Both links found via Wiki.

From the screenplay blog http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//009975.html

[snip]

Interestingly, Bioshock is rated MA15+, because apparently harvesting your recreational stimulants from little girls' bodies isn't anywhere near as bad as paying money for them.

The first thing I thought when I read this was: they just refused classification, right? That's not the same thing as banning. While mainstream shops won't sell it, surely it's still legally possible to buy it in some other way? Apparently not. From the Classification website:

Computer games that have been Refused Classification (RC) cannot be sold, hired or demonstrated in Australia.

Sounds like Australians are out of luck. (Unless Fallout 3 turns into an Oblivion clone, in which case nobody cares.)

From the screenplay blog http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//009975.html

[snip]

Interestingly, Bioshock is rated MA15+, because apparently harvesting your recreational stimulants from little girls' bodies isn't anywhere near as bad as paying money for them.

The first thing I thought when I read this was: they just refused classification, right? That's not the same thing as banning. While mainstream shops won't sell it, surely it's still legally possible to buy it in some other way? Apparently not. From the Classification website:

Computer games that have been Refused Classification (RC) cannot be sold, hired or demonstrated in Australia.

Sounds like Australians are out of luck. (Unless Fallout 3 turns into an Oblivion clone, in which case nobody cares.)

Even better, what if the Australian Classification Board had some sense and actually created an R18 rating for games rather than banning anything considered too explicit for M15?
Wait, that's too sensible.