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."

Comments

Potential Problem?

[smclean]

So is it then illegal to send notices to companies making allegations of copyright violations which are not true? If not, then a good way to get this law removed or modified would be to send out hundreds of e-mail to websites alleging copyright violation where there is none taking place. It would become common practice to ignore such requests, and those that were 'legitimate' would be lost in the crowd. The expense to businesses would be enormous and the law would be modified.

Am I missing something?

Previous Slashdot article

[RenHoek]

Rember this one?

Censoring The Net With A Hotmail Account

I think Australian ISP's will be very busy for the coming time..

FTAs are bad news...

[Goonie]

IP activists in America might do very well to pay more attention to what its government does in FTA negotiations. Not only does it force the rest of the world to sign up to your stupid friggin rules, it will make them much more difficult for America to change them when the time comes that you start winning the arguments in Congress.

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.

Creative, Lawful Retaliation?

[DoofusOfDeath]

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?