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CD Copying Kiosks Endorsed in Australia
Iron Sun writes: "While the story is somewhat misleading in stating that the plan legalises piracy, CD copying kiosks have been given the go ahead here in Australia. It will be interesting to see what the Australian Recording Industry Association says about this. Supposedly the plan involves royalty payments to ARIA, but where artists stand is not discussed."
Please, can we have a break from sensasionalism.
BTW I think this such is a cool idea. Way to go, Aussies !
Been there, seen that. We've had MD song imprinting services here in Tokyo for quite a while. You stick your MD in, pay some money, and press the touch screen to select the song you want to copy. It copies music 32x faster than it takes to listen to it. So if you had a 32 minute song it would take 1 minute to copy.
Again, i state. The author is a Music journalist, and is largely clueless on technology, pointed out by this article and other articles written by the author in my city newspaper.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
In australia the onus to avoid copyright infringement in on the user. So photocopying and CD burning in public and in private are treated the same. Oddly enough there is no need for some changeable, "fair use" docrine since you can copy whatever you like. If at a later date you are found to have breached copyright you can have the book thrown at you.
This approach has the benefit of being enforceable at least.
(one biased aussie's opinion)
imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein-
world- first plan that legalises [sic] music piracy
It's spelled "legalizes" in America, but it's spelled "legalises" in Britain, Australia, Canada, et al. There is no need for the "[sic]".
Ummm if this machine were putting out stamped cd's they would cost a fortune. Stampers aren't cheap to make u know, thats why its only feasible when you're making large quantities of identical cd's
The ones in Aus aren't nearly as wizz bang, at least not the one I saw a number of months ago. It twas purely a boring old box that you put your spiffy original disc in one tray, a blank disc in the other, and hey presto... wait... wait... wait a few minutes and you have your copy.
Unfortunately slower, and lacking both the cover creater and dancing robot thingy... how dull for us.
Having my own burner, and before that having many friends who have them, I've never had a need for such a gizmo, as the cost was prohibative ($5 a copy I think, blank disc not included)...
There is a double meaning for the company name "Little Ripper".
;-)
In Australia the word "ripper" is slang for excellent or great.
You often hear someone exclaim "you little ripper!" when they hear good news.
Guess it now also describes the 5-year old burning Wiggles CD's for his mates
smile, it makes everyone else wonder what you're up to
In the Netherlands legal problems are often solved by legalizing the crime. This is of course an exaggeration, but think of the infamous drugs and abortion legislation. In that line it is not surprising that although you are not allowed to copy music to (analog) audiotapes for commercial purposes ("fair use") you pay a certain fee for each empty tape (typically $0.25-0.50) as well as any new CD/LP/tape? with contents. (The same fee probably goes for empty CDRs, though I'm not sure)
The money collected does not go back directly into the record industry's pockets, but is distributed by an organisation called Buma/Stemra. (Link is in Dutch only, so use the fish.) Each (Dutch?) artist gets a share, which is statistically determined by Buma/stemra, based on record sales, radio broadcasts and festivals. This "intelectual tax" constitutes only a small amount of money for an individual artist (typically $10-$100 per year, for an amature band that sold 1000-5000 records), but it seems to be a fair start.
Could a system like that work in Australia as well?
There have been two such machines at Murdoch University here in Perth for at least two years.
I assume we are talking about the CopyCat CD burning kiosks , made/sold by Multi-Tech Australia .
These kiosks copy the bips 'n blips on the CD track directly through hardware, they have no software to read the track, or the formating information on the CD, for that matter.
So any errors or copy protection gets copied too & it doesn't matter if its a non-ISO or part non-ISO formated CD being copied.
They will copy HFS, BFS or packet formatted CDs, no problem.
I remember reading a a blurb about these kiosks (some supermarkets in Adelaide have them) & the CD reader just records the bip 'n blips on the CD being copied & the burner just copies those blips 'n bips onto the new CD in realtime.
Really they work more like punch-card copiers than tradition PC CD burning apps.
Consequently there's no way for these copiers to tell if the CD is copyrighted or has copy protection, as such there's no 'by design' copy protection by-passing software/hardware built in. Plus as there's no way for the machine to tell if a CD is copyrighted there's no 'moral perogative' to reject such CDs.
In a way the machines get arround the copyright laws the same way the Kazaa P2P network did in the Dutch courts. Like Kazaa it has legit functionality (backing up personal data or tranfering personal data, as is the case with Kazaa) & like Kazaa the design from the start has no ability to tell what's being copied & whether it copyrighted or has copy protection.
Hence AMCOS only choice other than a 6% levy was a long court case that they'd most probably lose. Really multi-Tech (or who ever) just decided to agree to the 6% levy because it saves a long drawn out court case & its easily passed on.
There's not much new here, only the roylaty payments stuff.
Here is the earlier story from april.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.