Slashdot Mirror
Australia Is Getting Its Own DMCA
biscuit nipple writes: "According to this article, our government snuck a little copyright law in under our noses. It just seems like a big moshpit of crap. Incidental copies of data, ie from an ISP, for transmission are ok, but deliberate copies (including proxy caches) are not." Also, "Libraries will have exemptions similar to the ones they already hold for distributing information but they will not be able to build up searchable collections, or provide material in competition with commercial providers." (Imagine if they applied that standard to books, too!)
I've just been skimming through a document on the website www.aph.gov.au which has a huge archive of all the goings on of the Australian parliament (I'm Australian, by the way). This document was interesting: http://search.aph.gov.au/search/ParlInfo.ASP?actio n=view&item=1&resultsID=OV8t2
It's a memorandum explaining every ammendment to the copyright act, all the viewpoints of all the stakeholders that had been gathered through the committee and hearing process, etc. What I gathered from reading this was:
a) They were trying to take the 1968 copyright act and simply remove all the technology-specific terms and make them technology-neutral (eg. take out 'wireless telegraphy', etc.). They were also doing their best to make all the laws and exemptions that were already in place for print media and wireless broadcast apply in exactly the same way to digital media. For example, it's OK to copy a portion of a copyrighted paper work without authorisation as long as you don't exceed 10% of the number of pages or one chapter (whichever comes first, I think). They changed the 10% reference to the number of words in the case of an electronic document, but said if a document existed in both print and electronic formats, only one of these requirements had to be satisfied. Similar attempts at uniformity are made all over the place. They also redefined what it means to copy things (eg. converting software from one form to another is still copying), what it means to authorise copying, etc.
b) Secondly, they wanted to make sure that there was the right amount of access to information over the internet, to actually satisfy concerned libraries and academic bodies. There are all kinds of ways they did this. It's a very long document.
c) Thirdly, they wanted to make sure that there were exemptions to the law that were appropriate to the online environment. This is where they made temporary caching exempt! If they hadn't, it would be illegal under the more general form of the old copyright law! They had to make the distinction between temporary caching and unauthorised copying, and what Slashdot has reported on is the way they made that distinction. I think it might be a bit harsh, but ISPs were strongly involved in this process.
d) Lastly, to satisfy the WIPO treaty, they had to address the circumvention of copy protection issue. They tried to do it so that devices with purposes *other* than just breaking copyright protection (eg. computers and VCRs) are exempt. My feeling from reading this is that only stand-alone devices are illegal, not, say, DVD players that can bypass region encoding. I don't know, though.
I don't know if the memorandum contains everything the way it was finally passed, but if you go to the website and search for 'copyright' you get a huge number of documents on the subject of these ammendments dating back around 10 years. I don't think this was passed secretly - all this information has been there for a long time. Also, I think it was bipartisan, I don't think the present opposition would have done anything differently. However, I couldn't find the hansard report of who voted and how.
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.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
The new legislation is the Copyright Ammendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000, available on AUSTLII
Technical reproductions made in the process of communication are exempt from the prohibition on copying digital works (ss. 43 and 111A). This is meant to protect ISPs and Carriers (which the Uni and Colleges are - probably). Whether copyright is breached will probably be determined as a question of degree; eg;
- Napster providing cacheing facilities allowing massive mp3 copyright infringement is bad.
- Cacheing purely to facilitate communication (eg. Universities) is OK.
Note that this is a question of degree and interpretation. Some (such as the views cited in the article) would argue that any cacheing is not purely to facilitate communication and is therefore in breach. I personally think (and hope) that the laws will be enforced more intelligently than that, only prohibiting copying restricting copyright users' rights.
Universities are worried that these new rights will allow copyright holders to charge per view, as opposed to the University downloading information once (and paying once) and then distributing it to students. They argue that this is like what University libraries do.
Anyway, I've gotten off the track. I think that cacheing that is purely for saving download costs (such as cacheing the hotmail.com frontpage) will be fine. Possible future pay-per-view lexus/nexus web-type things could cause problems.
The prohibition on circumvention (read hacking) devices has the exceptions of (amongst other things);
- making programs interoperable (s. 47D)
- correcting errors (s. 47E); and
- security testing (s.47F)
Which could make it sort of ok - although is decss (allowing DVD copying) security testing?
This, once again, is a question of degree and interpretation ...
---
---
soni bo da
Sign up for 50 free hours. Surf as much as you can to sites containing objectionable material. Have AOL Australia chasing it's tail trying to remove all the sites from their cache. It may not change anything, but what the hell, baiting the MPAA, RIAA and AOL all at the same time would be somewhat satisfying.
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.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
The EU's doing the same thing. See my page about the new EU copyright law.
We all keep talking about how we'll just move offending stuff to physically offshore locations. Have Napster set up shop in Japan, have DeCSS available for download from Canada.
And there's the old truism that "you can't regulate the internet, it's global". The problem is that when every country in the world has passed the DMCA there's nowhere left to go....
I don't get this at all. How is something "an effective technological protection measure" if a circumvention device exists?
I mean, a strip of stickytape is an effective way to lock your car door - if nobody is allowed to have a finger to peel it off with.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The Second Reading Speech (which has legal bearing on the spirit of the law) is here
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
I spoke with a bloke who attended a briefing by the solicitors for the AVCC (Australian Vice Chancellor's Council - the AVCC control AARNET, the internet 'backbone' across the universities here).
/. can be bothered to complain to the authorities here.
/. can prove the front page was placed there deliberately.
The solicitors have advised a 'wait and see' approach, and this seems an even-handed way to go about things.
The keyword is 'deliberate'. www.slashdot.org is probably one of the most popular pages at Monash university and is always in the cache.
But if anyone were to *deliberately* place www.slashdot.org in the cache, they might have some explaining to do, if:
o Anybody at
o Anybody can actually figure out what's in the cache from the US (from anywhere outside Monash, actually).
o
Socceroo
Does anyone know of a link to the text of this bill? The article is quite vague (standard mainstream media quality). I'd love to read (or at least skim) the real thing to see what it really means.
For example, it doesn't go into any detail regarding what constitutes "digitally protected material" - does this cover only materials already protected by strong crypto (not much legislation required) or anything that someone chooses to protect by any means (DMCA-style - protect your copyrighted work with ROT-13 and make un-ROT-13 illegal)? Or is there a legal definition of "protected" which says how the protection must work?
From the article:
How does anyone define what is "deliberate"? If I set up an HTTP proxy in order to minimize traffic on an outgoing line, am I potentially in violation of Australian law? I may have deliberately set up the proxy server, but after that, I do not control what goes through it.
And what about the fact that my HTTP proxy can't even decode the material? Does this act represent an attempt to regulate the copying of the digitally-protected materials (like caching the encoded data, or copying a DVD bit-for-bit) or just the decoded, unprotected materials (distributing de-CSSed DVD content)?
Or perhaps Australian legislators don't realise the importance of caching to the health of the Internet... If every client had to talk directly to the originating server for every request, the Internet would have brought to its knees years ago under the load. Caching, mirroring, and other techniques based on making local copies of data are what keep the network running (Slashdot effect aside)
(I'm glad to see that they're not planning on making computers illegal :)
If there are any Aussies reading who are familiar with this legislation, I'd be very interested in hearing more (especially how it got this far without anyone hearing about it (for anyone, read me.))
Living better through chemicals
So basically the government is trying to censor or copyright everything digital in the hope that nothing will be legal on the internet soon. Then what....??
What really sux about the whole copyright issue in Australia is how corporations are exempt from copyright (at least in some areas). Take for example pirated music CDs. It is totally illegal for a regular person to copy a CD and sell it to someone else even at a cheap price - BUT it is legal for companies to import pirated CDs from indonesia and sell them at a high profit margin. If companies are allowed to pirate stuff, and even make a profit off it, then all citizens should be given that same right!
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
Maybe this is just me, but with the open source world getting it's butt kicked more and more by DMCA's and UCITA, I'm feeling more and more that people who crack down open source reverse-engineering have no business using free software. Should there be clause added to the GPL and other open licenses that prohibits jerks like movie studios from benefitting from the same process they try to destroy? Should we tolerate movie studios getting their movies cheaply rendered with Beowulf and cheaply and securely promoted on the net with Apache and Linux when the very same people who create that software cannot legally watch those very same movies? Any opinions?
This is another brilliant example of corrupt law-makers not understanding how the world works combined with some old-fashioned short-sightedness.
Good laws should spring up to enforce social conventions and give them legitimacy. For example, if a society can agree that it entering people's houses and taking stuff is wrong, then the laws should reflect that. If we lived in a society which stressed the unimportance of having personal space or possessions, the law would probably reflect that. I admit Im probably being a little philosophical here, but consider the alternatives.
Laws should not (in my obviously not consulted opinion) be created to shape society, especially in ways that are non-intuitive to the average person, and benefit only a small minority. By this, I mean that the vast majority of people out there dont really consider it stealing to trade files and music with one another. That such copying is immoral has been propagandized by the software (remember MSFT circa early 1980s?) and entertainment industries for many many years. When this propaganda failed to sway the behaviour and sentiment of the public, they resorted to pushing through unfair laws to force us to obey.
I, for one, think that people, even in government, are mostly fair and intelligent. Companies will change or companies will fade. Once pocketbooks are hit, eyes will open.
When the Internet was first created, it was intended to be used to exchange the ideas and work of universitys and promote a better intellectual solidarity. Now it's intitial purpose has been thwarted, and it's subject to the whims of the commercial world. Governments pandying to the big companies propogate this, leaving the true enthusiasts/intellectuals behind. With the internet, we have an opportunity to do something that is unprecedented. We have freedom of speech, freedom to exchange and express ideas. We have anonymity, free from racial and social predjudices, where people can only judge us by what we say and think, not where we come from and how we look. Why must we abandon this to shallow commercialism. Thats what we have TV for, right?