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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?
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