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?"

Comments

Well...

[vidarlo]

Australia was originally a place for criminals. J/K aside, what Australia has , is interesting enough.

But the big question in my eyes is not whatever they make unDRM'd material legal to copy. The interesting thing if is they do as USA (And as Norwegian government tried to do), to make it illegal to circumvent copyright protection measurments. If that's the case, they pretty much ensure it is still illegal to copy media, because most media seems to be DRM'd those days, or at least has potential to be.

So to really make a difference, this has to legalize copying of any media, for non-commercial, private purposes, like listnening to it at your Personal Music Player. If they choose to do, it might stake out a path forward for other nations to follow.

I'm also for a law on media, that discusses your right to the exemplar, or just a general license to use that piece of media as you see fit. I'm for the last option. Let me buy a CD, and thereby rights to MP3s, oggs, and even a new cd for the production-cost of the cd (e.g 1-2$) if I loose the first one. Such a general license would be a nice thing.

'Transferbangle'?

[FireballX301]

I suppose I'll go ahead and snark the glowboxy in order to transferbangle redundanmancy for general purposes.

On a side note google gave only 2 hits for transferbangle, both dupes of this little blurb. So yeah, uh, made up words suck.

Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US)

[ScrewMaster]

Up to a point ... legalizing murder would probably cause more problems that it would solve, even if the vast majority of the population thought it was a good idea. And copyright holders are, after all, part of those people you're talking about. It would be very shortsighted of us to ignore their needs since they create things that we want! Or at least, own the rights to things that we want. Conversely, it is equally wrong to tilt things so far in their favor that the rest of us get hurt. We had struck a pretty decent balance here, for a couple hundred years. That's what got thrown out of whack recently.

The issue (both here in the U.S. and in Australia) has less to do with the rights of the individual as it does with undue corporate influence in government. I don't know about Australia, but for a very long time the United States permitted limited duplication of copyrighted works by individuals. Fair use, and all that. Then, at the behest of some very large corporations that right was effectively nullified (oh sure, technically we still have it but in practice we don't ... just encrypt your data and fair use goes right out the window.) Too bad so many otherwise civilized nations have been modelling changes to their "intellectual property" laws after the way the United States' are now, rather than how they used to be.

The scary part is

[zappepcs]

that Australia is not doing something special, they are simply catching up to most of the rest of the world as far as fair use goes. This should allow IMTS and others to open up for business there. The other scary part is that governments look at 'copyright industries' as a large tax source, so will always be overprotected.

FTA: "We should have copyright laws that are more targeted at the real problem," Mr Ruddock said. "We should not treat everyday Australians who want to use technology to enjoy copyright material they have obtained legally as infringers where this does not cause harm to our copyright industries."

I agree that treating everyday users as criminals is bad, but worse is treating 'copyright industries' as something special, something to be protected. This is not the way to encourage competition etc. There are so many different and important issues wrapped up in copyright protection and fair use that no single change will make everything ok. It will take many changes, most notably a change in attitude. When people are willing to get anything they can as cheap as they can find it, people will find a way to sell it to them, whether that is by pirating copies of movies and music or getting Chinese people to make clothes and durable goods at near slavery wages.

Addressing simple issues of theft or fair use is not *THE* answer, entire business practices, including those of protectionist governments, need to be addressed. In the mean time, I'm afriad that the protected will continue to bully their way into even greater protected situations until things come undone completely.