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Australians Allowed to Format Shift Media
An anonymous reader writes "Australian Federal law will now allow format shifting of media (ie:Ripping CDs to MP3s). Something long allowed under US copyright legislation, but only now coming to the Land Down Under." From the article: "Once the new laws are passed, 'format shifting' of music, newspapers and books from personal collections onto MP3 players will become legal. The new laws will also make it legal for people to tape television and radio programs for playback later, a practice currently prohibited although millions of people regularly do it. Under the current regime, millions of households a day are breaking the law when they tape a show and watch it at another time."
Wins like this give me hope for the reversal of some rediculous copyright restrictions here in the US.
On one hand, being a U.S. citizen, I'm glad to hear we aren't the absolute most backwards Western country in the world in terms of consumer rights and protections when it comes to media.
On the other hand, the Australians may be lagging behind, but at least they're moving in the right direction. Sometimes it seems like we hit the high-water mark of consumer rights in this country, and are now starting to go the other way. That pretty much takes the fun out of all the holier-than-thou comments.
My personal feeling is that the laws here with regards to content and media jumped the shark when they said it was illegal to decode certain satellite broadcasts. To me, this is illogical: they're beaming their transmissions onto my property. Why shouldn't I be able to put up an antenna, feed it into a receiver, and do whatever the hell I want with the resulting output? If you want to pick a particular moment when the FCC stopped being an agent of the public interest and instead became an organ of the media distribution companies, that's it. It's pretty much a direct line of descent from those rulings, to the DMCA and its anti-circumvention rules, to things yet to come like the broadcast flag. I truly believe that at some point in the future (which I doubt I'll live to see) people will look back at the early satellite TV scrambling/demodulation laws (and their enforcement) as a turning point in public policy.
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Attn Gen Phillip Ruddock is the primary cause of this push. There was an article a while back in which Mr Ruddock was quoted as saying that the current laws were pointless. Strangely enough I think he got his lightbulb on his head from the fact that his kids/grandkids had ipods and they werent "legally" allowed to copy music onto them at the time - no itunes...or so the story goes.
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
The interesting history behind the copyright legislation as I understand it is the US enacted copyright law and basically stated they would refuse to trade with countries that didn't enact similar legislation.
Australia enacted a law in response to that but codified much stricter details than the US laws.
Stupid but true. (According to a Lawyer speaking on the subject many years ago... 12 years! YIKES!)
I guess this is a bit of a pendulum swinging slightly. I guess the more restrictive laws would inevitably become more problematic with the pace of change of technology in this space since.
Hurry the heck up with these laws already!
At one place I work it is a (much hated) policy that certain digital music files are not allowed on the network. This is to protect my place of work from lawsuits. I work in a sysadmin role, and if I find any such files, I'm obligated to delete them. You can imagine how much I love it when someone needs their PC fixed, I run into a set of MP3s, and they seem to be legit (ie. a rip from one CD I've seen in their office). I have to delete them, and explain that they can't have them due to the stupid policy, that I've actually removed them, but if it were up to me I would have left them there. Argh!
When new laws such as these are in place maybe they can ditch that ridiculous policy. It's one part I hate about my job.
So if it's legal to 'format shift', does that mean it's now illegal to try to prevent this with 'copy protection' mechanisms?
remove the laws that shouldn't have been on the books to begin with, or laws that have run their reasonable useful course.
From another perspective when the masses are doing something regardless of the man made laws saying not to, then it is politically wise to go along so long as there are no real victims.
In the early 1990's the Pope gave into Galileos thoughts about the earth revolving around the sun, because they were losing followers with their misguided teachings.
France had, for a very brief time, a law that even went a bit further. It even forced providers of data in a certain format to explain the format used and that you can transfer it to another.
No week after that law went into existance, it was toppled. Now the rule says you can, unless you're circumventing some DRM (ha, ha. Comes close to "you may copy CDs, but only when there's no copy protection". But since all of them are protected...).
In other words, I'm quite sure we'll see some heavy lobbying, followed by a reduction of this law into senselessness.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.