Public CD Copying Machine in Australia

kanad writes: "With all the news of banning cd burners, taxing blank CD-Rs, DMCA, and whatnot in the U.S., here's a breather from Australia. Some stores have installed coin-operated CD copying machines. Basically it's very simple: put the CD to be copied and a blank CD in two different slots and drop your coins and Presto! In 10 minutes you get a copy. It even bypasses some anti-copying measures. ... Obviously the burden of not violating copyright rests with the user under Australian law, which is the same as that applied to photocopiers. Today evening I saw the machine and it's really cool. Wonder what would happen to this machine in U.S. and Europe."

Comments

popping noise

[abe ferlman]

That giant popping noise you hear is Hilary Rosen herniating herself when she reads this article.

Xerox machines were to the publishing industry are what the Boston Strangler was to a woman alone, to paraphrase Jack Valenti. Given that no one bothers to write books anymore since perfect copies can be made inexpensively, I'm sure we'll wise up this time and stop this reckless sharing of information in its tracks.

Re:popping noise

[raresilk]

I'll call the analogy and raise you one. Textbooks (at least here in the USA, and last time I was in school) cost anywhere from $75 - $150 a pop new. Every professor who has enough pull writes his/her own expensive text and assigns it in every class. The texts range from brilliant to useful to crap but you still have to have them because the professor will make sure something on the final comes straight out of them.

It does not take a genius to figure out that "$150 a textbook" or "$15 a CD" is not the fair market price, nor does it take a genius to figure out that such price gouging depends on the active collusion of sellers to the customer's disadvantage. I submit that when customers know they are being gouged, whether through overpriced textbooks sold to a captive student audience or overpriced CDs sold by a cartel with a large proportion of the musician population under long-term contractual captivity, they are highly likely to attempt to turn the situation around on the gougers.

Antitrust law enforcement is supposed to prevent such anticompetitive pricing from taking place, but with a few high-profile exceptions, the authorities have abdicated their role. What we see in the copying wars is old fashioned vigilante justice, and it's going to continue until the Justice Department regains its guts and goes after the publishing/music cartels.

(thank you for indulging this rant.)

$70 million a year loss?

[Ioldanach]

Music Industry Piracy Investigations spokesman Michael Speck said illegal copying already cost the Australian industry $70 million a year.

I'd really like to know the source of this number. This number implies something like 7 million illegal copies being distributed per year. (This assumes, for argument's sake, an average of $10 per cd retail.) I'm not sure there are that many blank cds being sold per year in Australia. Did they just take the number of blank cds being sold, multiply by the cost of some of the more expensive cds, and assume every cd was used to make a infringing copy of a music cd? To top that off, did they assume that if the recipient of that music cd hadn't gotten the infringing copy, the album would've been purchased instead?

Personally, I have just as many data cds as music cds, and most of the music cds I have are copies of my own music for travel and taking mp3s of my music to work.

Re:Another completely far wing article

[Odinson]

Not to mention copying Linux distros for friends.

Somebody should tell Glenn A. Baker that some copright holders like that kind of copying. They have as many moral and legal rights as he does, he is very inconsiderate.

http://www.openmusicregistry.org/

http://www.fsf.org/