Fair Use Review in Australia

Jaka writes "The Australian Attorney-General's Department is conducting a review on exceptions to copyright law. Currently Australia allows 4 specific 'fair dealing' exceptions (research or study; criticism or review; reporting of news; and professional advice given by a legal practitioner, patent attorney, or trade marks attorney - it's technically illegal here to convert songs from CD to MP3, or to record a TV show unless it's a live broadcast). They have published a request for public submissions (.pdf or .doc) on whether to expand this list, or adopt an open-ended 'fair use' policy similar to that used in the US and allow the courts to decide if any particular use of copyrighted material should be excepted from copyright law. As we're getting our own version of the DMCA thanks to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, if something isn't done to broaden copyright exceptions we'll end up with even more draconian copyright restrictions than the US."

Comments

Actually...

[ta bu shi da yu]

... I always laugh when I hear this. The US was founded by a bunch of people fleeing persecution from the British, who were quite willing to do horrible things to them in their thousands. They lived their lives to a strict moral code, true, but I doubt you'd be looking into the causes of that because for that you'd need half a brain.

Perhaps if more people studied church history we wouldn't hear these particularly stupid comments everytime we get to the old "Australia the land of convicts", "Oh yeah? You guys were founded by uptight Puritans!" retorts.