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Tougher Copyright Laws for Australia
smee2 writes "The Age reports Tougher copyright laws linked to the Australia-US free trade agreement (FTA) have been passed by the Australian parliament, AAP reports.
The bill, which passed the Senate last night, will enable people other than copyright owners to force internet service providers to take down material allegedly infringing copyright."
Isn't Sharman Networks based in Australia? I wonder if this will affect Kazaa.
Am I missing something?
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
Rember this one?
Censoring The Net With A Hotmail Account
I think Australian ISP's will be very busy for the coming time..
I wish it were that simple, but increasingly over the past years Australia has been turning more and more to the US for "guidance" and in return the US has had things to say on Australian policy on more than one occasion (including their preference for our current government over the opposition, in our recent elections). The sad thing is that Australians seem to listen; we can't seem to think for ourselves anymore, and everything has to have the approval of the US. It's just about to the point where the US elections were more important to us than our own. It's be nice if our Government had the balls (or brains) to think on its own.
Ahahaha.
dude, they already did that 5-6 years ago. It didn't work then, infact all it did was drive a few porn-site operators out of Australia and move their hosting to the US, where it was CHEAPER to host the data (by a reasonable margin, what's more). Just take Abby Winters as a good example (google it yourself). She was pissed that she had to stop paying an Australian company money to host her material, even tho it was more expensive, iirc.
The blacklisting that was supposed to accompany it was a complete joke, what's more, and has failed miserably, a grand total of about 20 sites got reported in the first year or two, and no-one's heard of it since.
Good to see that Australia doesn't have the parents television council or whatever that bunch of whackos they have in the US is making things 'safer' for Australians (yet, *knocks wood*)
ashridah
The Australian FTA is particularly bad for Australia (from a purely monetary American perspective, you should be glad the Australian government is such a ham-fisted negotiator), but I don't think it's particularly unique here. In fact, FTAs are bad news all round - and this is coming from a perspective of mostly being in favour of free trade. They force all sorts of stupid tracking costs so you can prove that you're not acting as a transshipment point for goods from countries not covered by the FTA, cause all sorts of distortions, and serve as a convenient political cover to force through all sorts of measures multinationals like but citizens aren't so keen on.
Frankly, I think the rest of the world should gang up on the United States at the next round of WTO negotiations and demand looser IP laws. Even if they don't get them it's a hell of a bargaining chip to get the US to play ball on a lot of other issues.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I've heard very little discussion about how we (people who believe copywright and patent law has tipped too far in the corporations' favor) can use these laws AGAINST the big guys.
An earlier post suggested overwhelming Aussie ISPs with inaccurate copyright-breach claims.
But how about taking these laws to their logical, unreasonable conclussions on the lawmakers' and coprorations' own turfs?
For example:
- Bring coypright violation claims against the websites of the Aussie parliamentarians / senators / corporations that supported the bill.
- Try to find ACTAUL copyright violations of these guys. Then tell ISPs to bring down these offending sites. But do it in a trickle of death. I.e., don't tell the site maintainers about all infringing content at once. Rather, tell the ISP about it once offence at a time, requiring a new take-down---fix-content---bring-up cycle for each offence.
- Develop our own submarine patent portfolio for use against corporations.
I think at best this could get new versions of the law up for consideration by lawmakers. Unfortunately, that just gives the special interests more of an opportunity to craft law to our disadvantage.
How do we actually get the lawmakers to TRY to craft law that's fair or even anti-copyright? Is there no way we can do it, since they ALWAYS ultimately follow the money?
What is likely to happen is that ISPs will simply bump up their prices to cover the cost of processing all those notices.
And amend their terms of service so that when they process and act on a fake takedown notice there is nothing the customer can do against them.
and now they are succeeding in spreading it to the rest of the world. Throughout history talented individuals created artistic movements. These movements are often based upon the foundation built by others. Artists copied the work of others and then changed it to suit their needs. As these ideas became popular they were copied yet again from others. How long until even this will be not allowed? Imagine if you will what would happen if the precepts that are taking over in the entertainment field were to be applied to science? Imagine what would have happened to the newspaper industry if the current laws had been on the book back when it was starting to take off?
I hope politicians in other countries aren't so ready to follow the US so blindly down the path to mediocrity. But it looks like it is too late for the Aussies.
One that takes all the good things from the different networks and makes them into the ultimate P2P app.
It should have:
1.complete open unencumbered protocol specs
2.Open Source reference implementation
3.Complete encryption of all files shared along with random files being stored in random locations (i.e. like Freenet has where its next to impossible for anyone to tell exactly what files a given person is actually sharing). It should be designed such that even the owner of the machine has no way to know who is downloading what from their machine.
4.Good search feature so you can find what you want easily (including an equivelent of the ed2k:// links so websites and stuff can link to files on this network)
5.communication features (ala IM/chat) that let you find and talk to other network users.
6.Encrypted network traffic. A great way to do this would be to encapsulate everything with SSH so that anyone in the middle only sees SSH requests. This makes it harder for service providers to shape or block it without harming all those who use SSH for its many many legitimate purposes such as CVS and remote access.
7.It should feature downloading from multiple sources if available (i.e. spread the load around)
8.It should feature a built-in program similar to peer-guardian and other such programs that can block IP address ranges owned by the copyright police (with the database being totally open for all to see as well as ways to add your own local entries if you want). Certainly this would be incorporated into the protocol specs and the reference implementation.
9.It should be deasigned to be totally non-relient on any one central server or servers.
and 10.It should be designed such that it does not require large system requirements (e.g. big CPU usage, large RAM usage, big disk space requirements etc) and so that it doesnt have undue bandwidth requirements (i.e. no more than current P2P apps require)
Because its Open Source (and Open Specifications too), there is no central target to go after like there is with kazza or napster or audiogalaxy.
Development of clients can happen in many countries and in many places making it impossible to stamp out. (plus, if its popular, it will be mirrored in plenty of places simply through that fact alone)
Because its encrypted and goes over SSH (or something else standard if SSH is not sutable), its difficult to block this without getting legitimate users of that service annoyed
Because it has the encryption and "files can be anywhere" features of Freenet its much harder for the copyright police to link files to machines/IP addresses (which makes figuring out who to sue harder) Also, this means that it would be possible to show (even in a court of law) that you didnt know that your file share contained copyrighted material, child porn, terrorist stuff, music not produced by the RIAA cartels or whatever else that the government who holds juristiction over the machine in question has decided to declare "illegal" this week.
Because it has IP blocking (like Peer-Guardian etc) its easier to find where the copyright police are scanning from and stop them from connecting to your machine
Will all people other than the copyright holders be able to do this? Will only the duly appointed representative of the copyright holder have any standing?
The problem with such an open ended definition is that the quote in the submission makes it sound like anyone can suddenly make ISPs do all sorts of things.
And to you Aussies, I feel for you. As a Canadian we frequently find that FTA with the Americans means "you must buy our stuff, but your cheaper made goods are unacceptable". It ends up feeling being a new open market to sell US goods without any reciprocation whatsoever. They're too busy passing laws to protect their own industries.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I was using SSH for a while, backing up my hard drive's overflow onto a friend's server. But then one of his up-stream providers apparently decided to block it. My friend's internet service still works for him, but heck, I can't even ping my backup server there at his office. My traceroutes go AWOL about where they come to his city-wide aggregator, not even his local ISP!
His local authorities have legitimate reasons for network-warfare paranoia. They do have high-grade criminal and foreign-intelligence activities to try and block; and they don't have an army of English-speaking network experts to keep up with all the latest hacks & counter-hacks. But my point is, their action has disabled legitimate use of the net.
And this kind of shit is happening everywhere.
So we need to be thinking about steganographic successors to SSH, if we are to take what is left of the net and restore some usefulness. So to your list, I want to add:
11) We need systems that tunnel everything through what appear to be simple, boring port-80 http requests.
12) And we need ways to make it all work from behind fascist NAT firewalls--NATted http is already all the access many of us have left. [Let me add, BitComet's NAT hack is glorious. So is the TSP IPv6 client's NAT tunnel, if only more stuff would become IPv6-aware and use it.]
13) We also need virtual clients/ nodes implementing the above features, that can for example run entirely in web-browser Java plugins, to be used portably on locked-down public-access machines. [I'm thinking partly of Portable Firefox et al that can run on machines without installing; but also Azureus & the MindTerm SSH client, and all those web-based virus scanners.]
We do need ways to communicate securely between machines, without looking guilty with all that obvious encryption; without drawing so much traffic-analyzable attention to ourselves. In this perspective, SSH with its up-front encryption [even when it works] is just a first-generation hack. Mere crypto always looks guilty; always makes authorities nervous. The SSH needs to run on top of an additional, steganographic layer.
The internet was a nice idea while it lasted. But if we are going to keep the net useful for anything better than viewing adds, there are a lot of great programming challenges still out there. That's why I keep hoping all you laid-off hot-shot programmers we hear about, don't get depressed and let your skills rust just because the management doesn't want you any more.
http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2004/11/emgo ne_with_the.html
erroneous slash sorry
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
BS. Opposition to Israeli violence against Palestinians and opposition to Palestinian violence against Israelis are not mutually exclusive. Though you are taking it a step further, and equating disaproval of Israeli violence with approval of terrorism in general. This is completely absurd. Some of us are opposed to the killing of innocents, for whatever cause, be it 'Islam' or 'the War On Terror'.
The reason the GP mentioned only Israeli violence is that the US and some of its allies actively support this violence
If this were the case he would have mentioned Palestinian violence against Israel. It also shows the anti-american sentiment he had because the whole post was complaining about how Australia is the US bitch. The killing of innocents is wrong, but not defending yourself when attacked, inaction and acquiesence in the face of intimidation, is wrong, which is why it is supported by the US and Israel's allies.
It's not the only place - what about the White House? Oh yeah, no one considers him a statesman, never mind.
You're so witty... I'm sure the globalists, Soros, and Chomsky would love to give you a cookie for that gem of insight.
If your concern is with his foreign policy, grow up. One murder in the Netherlands by a radical has the people up in arms and ready to close the borders to muslim immigrants. United States borders are still open to all. Three thousand were dead here the US is retalliating against those who were committed the acts.
If your concern is with the fact that he isn't a great orator, do you really need to be an orator to be a President? No. Many former great Presidents have had this more personable quality.
If your concern is with domestic policy, stop getting information from moveon.org, and democratic underground, and you'll see that it is the time for entreprenuers to rise in the US and start innovating again with the same vigor that made it great.