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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 !
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]".
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
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.