Slashdot Mirror
Australian Media 'Crooks' to Come in from the Cold
pagefault writes "News.com is reporting that millions of Australians who tape TV shows and copy CDs will soon get the right to do it with a clear conscience. From the article: 'The Federal Government will next year legalize the video recording of television shows for personal use, and the transfer of songs from CDs to MP3 players, in a bid to overturn a ban which has made criminals of much of the population."
I mean, I live in Canadam, and I can buy a spindle of 50 blank CDRs for 8.99 CDN or so on sale, 50 DVDs for 9.99. Thats 18 measly cents a disc for CDRs or 20 cents a disc for DVDs... its even less for DVDs if you figure it per GB. The levy is pretty much irrelevant.
Surely a blatant attempt by the media companies to get back at Apple for refusing to allowing to gouge the consumer even more by the 99c/song price.
Perhaps you meant AU$1.69?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Nah, they were rarely enforced. Most people don't know they exist, and that's fair enough, because you assume if you buy a CD you have the right to make a copy of it for yourself. That makes sense. The laws against it don't. It's only with the rise of portable MP3 players that the media has picked up on the fact that, before the recent opening of the Australian iTunes store, there was almost no legal use for an iPod in Australia, yet they were selling in their thousands.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
They were a penal colony founded on crimials, but their nation was definitely NOT founded on a basis of criminality, regardless of what the british thought at the time.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Yes, Australia started out as a group of penal colonies (mostly)...
Yes, There were a lot of penal settlements...
However, most of the people sentenced for transportation were sentenced for quite petty "crimes", say, stealing a loaf of bread or poaching a rabbit so their kids didn't die of starvation.... obviously a hanging offense. It was the 18th century equivalent of running a red light. They still managed to tame the harshest continent on earth and prosper, creating one of the greatest egalitarian societies the world has ever seen.
Secondly, that still only accounted for a very small minority of the population. I'm hazy on the exact figures but only about 4% of the Aus population have any convict descent at all, something like 40% of the current population wasn't even BORN here. Add to that the vast numbers of free settlers who immigrated here over the last 2 hundred years seeking a better life while creating the worlds only multicultural success story (apart from the occasional whacko who appears in every society, and some recent blown-out-of-proportion beach riots where the citizenry took back the beach from thug troublemakers of Middle-Eastern appearance).
Add in the worlds best beaches, coral reefs, rainforests, snow country and general quality of life and all-in-all we feel sorry for anyone who DOESN'T live here. Accuse me of parochialism as much as you want, the fact remains it's God's Own Country with pretty much all of the advantages found elsewhere without most of the disadvantages. Sure we don't get it right all the time but hey, it's pretty damn close.
Now contrast that with a country (no names) who was founded by extremist religious whack-jobs fleeing incarceration once Europe finally took out the trash, who eagerly embraced slavery, who eliminated pretty much all of the native population, who's Founding Fathers were mainly sozzled drunks beating their manservants and who now comprises 5% of the worlds population but accounts for over 50% of the worlds drug usage and who gun each other down by the tens of thousands in the streets each year.
A nation of peaceful, easy to live with honest people or a nation of murdering drug addicts ?..
wow, tough choice....
Oh, and British people are generally ugly and have major personal hygeine problems, so we can forget about them too !
And more to the point, many of the people originally shipped to Australia were convicted of offences which would be considered barely criminal today, like stealing a loaf of bread (or copying a CD?).
I wonder if any of the convicts on the First Fleet were sent over for stealing music? Sneaking into a concert hall for example?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Australia does have Fair Use (or "Fair Dealing") provisions in copyright, it's just that home recording/time shifting isn't one of those provisions.
Australian Fair Dealing provisions allow for:
- research or study
- criticism or review
- reporting of news
- professional advice given by a legal practitioner or patent attorney
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It's interesting that nearly EVERY comment is about Australia being founded by criminals. Do they teach nothing more than that in other places around the world?
What about the fact that it's the country (a government department no less!) that invented 802.11g?
What about the fact that a hell of a lot of healthcare stuff is started in Australia?
I remember reading something a while ago about the bionic ear was an Australian invention, and probably a ton of other stuff...
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Wow, I didn't know about these laws. Were they enforced often, or just placed on the books so that they could say they did, and then largely ignored?
This is not so much about laws which explicitely forbid personal copying. This has more to do with the fact that since we did not previously have explicit laws allowing "fair use" type provisions, the copyright laws could be applied to the absurd. So these new laws, open holes to allow the reasonable use of copying.
Like in firewalls with a default deny policy. We had no specific allow rule.
Was anyone ever even brought up against copyright laws due to what reasonable people would consider "fair use" in Australia? I know of none and it certainly was not common if it did ever happen. This is why judges exist in the first place. They are there to interpret what is right and wrong with respect to law and adherence to it.
Not that it would stop them, but remember that the Recording Industry Association of AMERICA has little sway in Australia...
Actually as much as I hate the many unfair provisions with relation to copyright law that Australia now needs to adopt, the fact is that we actually had DMCA laws before America. I'm going to have to move to New Zealand at this rate.
True, the first fleet and the great majority of the first bunch of people or so sent to Australia were convicts, but a vast number of free colonists migrated to Australia after that. Adelaide was started as a free colony. Melbourne grew because of gold. Sydney started as a penal colony.
There was a census done.. I forgot exactly when.. perhaps a hundred years after Australia was first settled by the Brits; 1788-1888. Of the entire European population in Australia, convicts and their descendants accounted for only 10%.
Indeed. This country was built on convict labour. The early settlers had convict labourers who were essentially state sanctioned slaves who worked to pay off their sentence. Most of this seemed to happen down in Van Deimans land (Tasmania). Two-time offenders would end up in prisons such as Port Arthur and Sarah Island. A childrens prison was created on an island just off Port Arthur called Point Peur. The children arriving at such a prison were often poor street kids who were sent to Van Deimans land for minor offences such as stealing food, etc.
Interesting that those two prisons at Port Arthur and Sarah Island became very efficient at ship building. Eventually the government shut down ship building operations because private companies could not compete with the low price of convict built ships.
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
Actually, we don't drink Foster's beer, we export it to people who ARE willing to drink it. Ha.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Drink it ? Is that what you're supposed to do with it ?
I use it to kill weeds and small children.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Australia was used as a penal colony because after the War for Independence they could no longer use America as a penal colony. Previously, those sentenced to "transportation" were shipped to Georgia.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
My question is how does the money raised by these levies find its way to the copyright holders? (Artists, publishers and so on.)
Basically, all the people not signed by an RIAA label get a net 4% of the goods taken by blank media taxes (they don't have RIAA lobby dollars working for them). RIAA-signed artists get a total of 38.4% of the take, and the RIAA member publishers get 57.6% of the take. Note that this is a description from the RIAA, so that 38.4% may potentially be siphoned off into that 57.6% via fees orwhat-have-you.
It's irritating knowing that a percentage chunk of sales of many computer storage devices goes to lobbyists working to punch holes in free use, and even more irritating knowing that despite the fact that I have to pay for potential infringement, I *still* don't get to infringe legally.
You know...every time the RIAA complains that they need to be around to fund artists, and it's important that they exist to do so, and if they didn't get federal protection in the form of funds...I wonder what would happen if *100%* of that tax went to artists -- publishers not included. That *would* fund artists, presumably cutting out the middleman. Never going to happen, but an fun thought.
Another interesting idea -- an artist can choose to be supported by blank media sales *but* need to place all their work into the public domain *or* be supported by regular retail sales but not get any blank media sale funding.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.