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Australia To Legalize VCR Recording and CD Ripping
paritosh writes "While the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to stop the assault of anti-consumer intellectual property laws, Australia is breaking free from them." From the article: "See, it is currently illegal in Australia to record shows off the telly, or to transferbangle (Australian for copy) music from CDs to portable music players. The end result is that a large portion of of the Australian citizenry are technically breaking the law, and while that may not sit poorly with a nation born of criminality, it makes the legal system look a tad bit ridiculous. Could you imagine shipping all of those offenders to Madagascar?"
While that may be true in a sense, most of the current Australians are actually descended from the guards; the prisoners didn't tend to reproduce very much.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Not really:
Australia is simply catching up - this isn't a step past where we are now. We can already legally record onto VCRs and rip CD's, no?
OTOH, this article does show that australia is willing to take an opposing stance to the normal sort of DRM mishmash going around the rest of the world.
This is a dupe, too, iirc.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
But questions remain. There is a possibility that Australia may follow in Canada's footsteps, and levy a tax on other things to make up for "lost" revenues. For instance, a tax could be levied...CD...
In Canada this sort of backfired on retailers. Hey, when you go over the border next week can you bring back lots of cheap media?
I think it's rather nonesevent, myself.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Technically a crime is whenever you break a law. But I have to wonder, at what point does a law become impotent? Take for instance the 18th amendment and the prohibition of alcohol. Something like 36 states ratified it, and yet almost everyone was ignoring it (especially the Kennedy's, which is where they made their fortune, in bootlegging). So the 21st amendment was eventually drafted repealing the 18th. If laws are something akin to a collectively agreed to moral pact that benefits and protects the majority of the citizens, isn't the law moot if the majority of the citizens choose to ignore said law?
$sys$droids
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it is really about what you can do, and not what a law says you can or can't.
There are plenty of laws in every country that are either not enforced, or are unenforceable because they're outdated and/or nobody knows it's illegal.
In this case, Australians can get away with transferring music to portable players because no one is enforcing the law.
The most draconian laws in the world are irrelevant if there is no will to enforce them at their highest level.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yes, Zonk fell for it. As he has before, and unless someone with a brain removes his editor stauts, he will again.
One has to wonder how he was picked as editor, as he certainly does not represent the community in any way. It was laughable when he was new, but now when the whole slashdot frontpage is full of his 'stories' its just sad. Its not that I disagree with him, that wouldnt be an issue. The problem is that there is ZERO fact checking, and MASSIVE rewording of stories, so much as to make it sound like a completely different thing is going on. And that leads me to the conclusion that this guy is just a paid shill for someone.
Try blocking his stories in your slashdot preferences. You can select which editors do and do not show up on your user page. I cant tell you how much of a difference it makes in the quality of slashdot by just removing that ONE editor
What do they call a whopper?
That way, they don't tie the wording of the law to any particular technology.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You are clearly typing while ignorant. Bud is a great beer if you take into account CONSISTANCY, every bottle tastes pretty much the same. Thats a damn amazing feat considering the volume they produce, and yes, they have tasters, and yes they have quality control. Bottled beer is also pastuerized, which alters the flavor slightly, as opposed to beer on tap. I'm really annoyed with beer snobs who talk out of thier ass, and trash whats common simply to elevate themselves in thier own little minds. You like what you like, personally I prefer Yuengling, that doesn't make me better or worse or smarter or dumber or in any way indicate my degree of class or sophistication. It simply indicates where my taste buds lie. Macrobrews are made to be accessable to the vast majority of the people. Niche beers fill in the rest. That's all I have to say.
It might be a problem for "you" - but the bully is obviously at fault. Why does the bully get a free pass, and the blame transferred to the victim? I guess victims of genocide are at fault for not standing up to people with weapons while they remain defenseless.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Many people confuse these two things: fair use and copyright.
Fair use helps the consumer, while copyright helps the producer.
Fair use gives consumer of the product legal ability to use the product in many different ways, which sometimes require making copies of the product for a number of reasons, as long as large portions of the original product are not being distributed illegaly - giving away or selling copies of those copyrighted MP3s, books, movies is illegal if you did not ask the authors permission. When is it fair use? When you are making a backup copy for yourself, when you are transfering data to a different format, so you can listen to it in the car on your stereo, as opposed to your PC. Using portions of the copyrighted works for creating a parody is also fair use. I don't see any moral problems with this type of fair use.
Copyright (normally time limited) protects the rights of the original author. What rights? The rights to a temporary monopoly on the distribution of the product. An argument that by copying you are not depriving the original author of anything is false. You are depriving the original author of the natural monopoly on the distribution by removing appearence of scarcity of the product. The product does not become less useful (noone wants a useless product,) but it makes the product appear WORTHLESS. Which obviously negates the possibility of the author retrieving the investment (s)he put into this useful work. In some cases not being able to retrieve the investment is very dangerous, as it may preclude the author from working on anything else that requires an investment - think multi-million dollar movies, think years and loans spent on writing successful novels/books, think years and money spent on software etc. Thus illegal distribution of copyrighted materials hurts the original authors by removing their ability of making money by removing monopoly on distribution and removing the appearence of scarcity, making the product worthless.
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Obviously today large corporations are using copyright laws to make large amounts of money on products that by any natural process should already belong in the public domain. For example it can be argued that copyright should not extend to anyone, once the original creator is dead. Lawyers of large corporations can convince the judge otherwise, and this is dangerous, because it sets people's attitudes against all copyrights.
Not everyone can afford spending years working on some highly desirable product and not make any money at the end, because the product becomes worthless in 3 weeks after the release.
You can't handle the truth.
My god as an Australian I found that article offensive. First they make up words that no one has ever heard, then they decided that all Australian is descended from criminals while blatently ignoring the fact that America was used as penal colony before Australia was. The whole thing is riddled with jabs at Australia. Is the American education system that bad or is the writer just willfully ignorant.
It's well known in Australia that only rednecks drink XXXX.
I was thinking more "Ship them to Madagascar? You mean round them up into camps and gas them?"