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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?"
Heh! Looks like 2006 is gonna be a great year! Australia is already there.
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.
I'm concerned about a government with a history of destroying basic rights with excessive laws trying to change those laws with more laws.
I've heard promises from politicians every time I open a paper or turn on the news -- and those promises never bear fruit. I'm no Austrialian, but I wonder if this law that will "give" you a right (rights aren't granted by law) is really all they say it is, or if it is just a shill for the copyright-supporting cartels in some way.
I guess only time will tell. I don't trust it and I don't believe it will help consumers in the long run, but here is one place I want to be proven wrong (with time!)
No way, mate!
It's a "repostbangle".
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
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.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
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.
These "Criminals" shouldnt be legalized, they should be fined and jailed! If people are allowed to use products they own in a way the "copyright" owners dont agree with, IT WILL BE THE END OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT!
civil disobedience, its whats for dinner.
From the article: "Someone get that man a Foster's!"
:)
The author clearly knows NOTHING about Australia!
In Australia you can't even find Fosters, and, if you can, no one drinks it as it's considered terrible beer.
Well, any people that can come up with gems like "flamin' herd 'o wild brumbies!" and "transferbangle" is definitely okay with me. And for that matter, if we're concerned about nations being born from criminals, well hell ... the United States has it all over Australia. We were founded by political and religious dissidents and broke away from England by starting a war (thereby pretty much criminalizing all of us so far as the Brits were concerned at the time.) And on top of that, we've spent a couple of hundred years accepting immigrants from just about everywhere, many of whom were less-than-upstanding citizens in their countries of origin (this is not always a bad thing however.) Austrialia was a prison colony once, sure, but so was America. At the very least it was a way to get rid of undesirables and put them to work, which is pretty much the same thing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
everyone is a criminal is the most sure way to keep the despotism of "order". We all break speeding laws. Most people have broken drug control laws. Millions of people consume "illegal" copies of entertainment media. Police state is only possible if most citizens are in one way or another criminal. So the logic that the law is ridiculous seems almost to contradict the set course of modern society. How will the aussies keep the populas in line?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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?
Even my d in kind duplicated.....
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
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
In aussie jailes they serve american beer.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Cool, Now I can toss out my DVR and get my old VCR's out of the attic and start recording. Anybody know where to find blank VHS tapes?
When a "transferbangle" doesn't worked because the source is DRM'd it becomes a "transferbungle."
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!
This detail, and other small (deliberate) errors in style and substance in the article, make me think this article is a huge troll and Zonk (who else?) fell for it.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Fritz Hollings just suggested to W. that Australia probably has WMDs.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I know where I want to move to. Somewhere where they're only just now allowing you to record TV with your VCR?
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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'
*IAA, wake the fuck up and smell the coffee. As long as you try to usurp copyright for your personal profits, we'll try to abolish it. And you can take that to the bank.
Pirates of the world - Unite!
Power to peer to peer!
Money for nothing, pix for free
Do they have the metric system? Do they know what the f--- a quarter pounder is?
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
Then come to Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/03/31/canada/downlo ad_court040331
However, do keep in mind that you must marry a member of the same sex. It isn't optional anymore and we are very strict about that.
Hungry Jack's® is a franchise of the international Burger King(TM) Corporation and has operated in Australia since 1971.
;)
When he said they're called Hungry Jacks, he meant it literally.
Apparently someone trademarked Burger King in Australia before the big fast food company got here. They tried to sell it to Burger King for an enormous profit but the price they asked was too high and Burger King simply decided to come up with a different name - Hungry Jacks. At least, that's the urban legend I grew up hearing.
Clearly now that situation has expired, because now we have both Burger King and Hungry Jacks stores in Australia.
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.
--
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.
>>>they do as USA ... make it illegal to circumvent copyright protection measurments.
They will have no choice. The USA will impose trade restictions in order to force all countries to adopt our policies. This goes for all the poor countries too. If another country wants to exit 3rd world status, they will do it the George W. Bush way or else become part of the "axis of evil".
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Job market is up and down just like everywhere else.
Broadband is dependant on where you are living.
Options are cable (10Mbit) where it's available, ADSL2+ (24Mbit) where that is available, ADSL2 (12Mbit) where that's available, or standard ADSL (1.5Mbit) pretty much everywhere in the capital cities.
Availability of the faster ADSL is limited at the moment as the non Telstra telco's roll out equipment into the various exchanges across the cities.
Cable is more available than ADSL2 in Sydney right now, not sure about the other cities.
I was thinking more "Ship them to Madagascar? You mean round them up into camps and gas them?"
"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."
When the United States Constitution was being drafted, Madison (et al) is on record as being opposed to the idea of having a Bill of Rights (it's my understanding that similar thinking kept a bill of rights out of Australia's federal government), as its existence implies that the Bill contains all the rights retained by the people and the states. He eventually had to backpedal a bit when he himself introduced the Bill of Rights to the first Congress, but even then they're carefully phrased in such away as to remove powers from government rather than giving them to the people ("Congress shall make no law..." instead of, say, Canada's "Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms...") and the Tenth Amendment was included.
My problem with this law is that it implies that VCR recording and CD ripping were illegal to begin with, and it required legislative action in Canberra for the government to grant these rights to the people it's supposed to be subservient to (in practice if not necessarily in legal theory). Basically, this is the Australian federal government telling the people "We can take away your right to do with your property as you please, but we're feeling magnanimous today."