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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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shifting is not the same as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_shifting.
Now I can use my iPod with more than just the free downloads from iTMS!
...until it is declared illegal?
:^)
I though you were supposed to be able to do format shifting and anything else as well, except that which is illegal. Seem that in Australia this is the other way around. Is this the new trend after 9/11?
I guess we should now check the latest version of the law books before doing anything IT-related.
A sad state of affairs
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Does it run on Linux?
No, not a troll. If the US has allowed us to rip CD's to MP3's, how come we here in the erroneously termed Land of the Free can't even listen to said MP3's!
Wonder if Australia has more sane software patent laws...
Does that mean that I can format shift it from the internet to my HDD? :P
"Under the current regime, millions of households a day are breaking the law when they tape a show and watch it at another time."
Imagine that, an entire nation composed of criminals!
I guess it's true; history repeats itself.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Wheee. I have this bad image of people being sent automatic/clueless infringement notices for downloading of archive.org or from Bands' websites...infringement proceedings...
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
ARIA has long argued that these changes will "just create loopholes for pirates". They have asserted that they would never ask for the average consumer to be prosecuted, so it didn't matter that it was illegal - a rather ridiculous argument, but one that the Government has been happy to accept up until now.
I hope that fair use copies of CDs are made legal in the legislation as well. It would be crazy to allow people to create a copy of their music for their iPod, but not for their car CD player. I guess if this isn't allowed, I can just create an MP3 CD for my car, since that would be format shifting, and my car CD player plays MP3s fine.
Also, I hope that the taping of TV shows isn't limited to analog copies, and that format shifting of DVDs is made legal too. It would be nice for my MythTV box to finally be legal, and for these guys' product to be legal as well.
All in all, this seems like a decent change, apart from the extra penalties for copyright infringers that have been added to keep copyright owners happy. One nice side benefit is that the legislation will probably give the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission some justification to rule against "copy controlled" CDs in the same way as they have ruled that region-locked DVD players are an unjust restriction of consumers' rights.
Wheee. I have this bad image of people being sent automatic/clueless infringement notices for downloading off archive.org or from bands' websites...
Old, tired joke that isn't funny at all.
Australia is a nation of criminals! America is a nation of Puritans! LOLOLOLOL!!!!
you guys got it all the wrong way round. just because it wasn't legal, doesn't mean it was enforced.
now a little to the left
For those who don't understand what Vegemite is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegemite
America is still worse, right?
No, I'm more questioning whether America is currently better, but headed rapidly in the wrong direction, while Australia is currently worse, but at least headed in the right direction. More of a cautionary statement than a value judgement per se.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's probably best for everyone that legal systems move slowly. At least then we can catch them when they start to move in the wrong direction.
Pardon me, but according to the DMCA we are explicitly NOT allowed to format shift.
That is what DRM is, it's an intentionally different format.
An encrypted file is in the most basic definition a file with a unique format, nothing more, and DRM as it exists is extremely dependent on format. To shift format is to remove DRM.
How is australia to reconcile this with their direct sellout and adoption of the DMCA through AUSFTA?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
just as we are losing our rights, they are gaining theirs. well, have still have the rights, but companies are putting in place technologies that make us violate dmca to do so. it's like putting locks on a doors of a public building that everyone is allowed to enter, but breaking the locks violate the law.
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.
The difference is that in the USA there is not specific rule that allows format shifting, just that the "Fair Use" law is actually just a set of vague guidelines to allow the courts to decide what is fair use and what is not.
Mostly that's a good thing, but sometimes it results in the definition of "Fair Use" in any one case coming down to who has the most money to spend on lawyers.
In Australia and other countries, there are "Fair Dealing" laws, that very precisely set down in law what is allowed and what is not. That means that they don't adapt well to new technologies, but does mean that you know where you stand, and don't have to worry so much about the whim of the court.
Advanced users are users too!
This is all part of the Australian Government's responsibilities under the so-called "Free Trade Agreement" signed last year. The other part - which they inexplicably fail to mention in that story, or any other currently on-line - is the introduction of DMCA-like legislation to go with it. Over the past few weeks there's been the occasional story in the media about this, mostly mentioning the benefits to Australians, but occasionally stating how the US government has been pressuring the Australian government to "align" their copyright laws with those of the US.
Or in a few words: We're finally getting legislated "fair-use" rights - along with a DMCA.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Come on UK Government! Enact something similar! And while you're at it, please make "Cliff's Law" banning crusty and offsenively-dressed performers in their late 60s from receiving royalties lest they ever think to abuse a microphone again.
To follow up my own post :
There's no official statement on the government website yet. Here's a link to the "Fair Use and other Copyright Exceptions" discussion paper.
Refer to sections 4, 10, 12, and Attachment B (article 17.4.7. of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement).
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
No, I'm more questioning whether America is currently better, but headed rapidly in the wrong direction, while Australia is currently worse, but at least headed in the right direction. More of a cautionary statement than a value judgement per se.
In other, geekier words, he's asking about the first derivative value rather than the function value: f'(t) rather than f(t).
Personally, I'm more concerned with f''(t). I have a friend that wants to know f'''(t). If we put them all together we'd have a 3rd-order Taylor series expansion, with which we might approximate America's goodness with regards to copyright law at f(t+10) with reasonable accuracy. Wicked.
I'm sure you'd be satisfied with a first-order approximation, though. That'll do in the short run.
Yes, I'm a grad student. It's just sick what it's done to my mind, isn't it?
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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.
Yay Yay DMCA,
Giving us copying rights today.
Hey, hang on, WTF?!?
Shitdrummer.
If you are looking for more info on Australian copyright laws try here http://www.copyright.org.au/ Here specically for infosheet(pdfs etc) http://www.copyright.org.au/publications/infosheet s.htm
And here for mp3/cd/radio etc
http://www.copyright.org.au/publications/G070.pdf
Oh, and don't forget this one - Line dancers & copyright
http://www.copyright.org.au/publications/G041.pdf :)
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
Thanks, Mr Ruddock.
You've just given me the legal right to do something which I wouldn't have otherwise hesitated to do for a nanosecond anyway.
This is the kind of law that gets passed by egocentric, naive politicians who assume that every unjust, unenforceable law they pass gets obeyed. Making any law regarding piracy is the practical equivalent of urinating into an oncoming cyclone; it has exactly the same degree of usefulness for what you're trying to do.
So if it's legal to 'format shift', does that mean it's now illegal to try to prevent this with 'copy protection' mechanisms?
Someone hand this dude a jar of Marmite. That'll teach him.
;-)
Rather than handing it to him, I'd advocate chaining his legs and arms together and giving him Vegemite intravenously. I actually heard about what happened to someone who tried shooting up Vegemite once...it really wasn't pretty.
He might've had better luck with the new squeezy Marmite...
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A former penal colony is opening up individual freedom ... while here in the United States, we are going through the criminalization of ruled-upon timeshifting and Fair Use practices.
Interesting.
You mean like the wonderful way DMCA and patents have been caught the instant they started moving in the wrong direction?
Better article here.
The actual draft legislation hasn't even been released, yet alone enacted, so there are a lot of grey areas.
Format shifting is allowed, but in effect it's only for CDs/vinyl/audio cassettes. They say they'll be monitoring the situation with DVDs, so that might be legalised in a year or two (i.e., once all the cool kids are already routinely watching copies on their iPod Videos the way they play CDs now). The Q&A document explicitly says that software is excluded, so you're out of luck if you want to transfer those Apple II programs off a type of media that hasn't been made in a decade. We also don't yet know precisely what is included under "format shift": they've said that you can't just make a backup copy of a CD to another CD, say, but not whether that includes ISO disc images or other lossless transcoding.
There are various other copyright problems right now which, going by their talking points, it doesn't address -- things like search engine image thumbnails and the Google Library project.
Time shifting is allowed, but you can only watch the program once -- no taping shows to keep. A family of five can't watch a taped program at different times. That particular idiocy is completely unenforceable, but puts us right back where we were before in terms of half the country routinely committing violations.
They say that uploading your format-shifted music to the internet will be illegal, but without enough details to say whether that includes online backup/storage/search services like Xdrive or Google Desktop Search. Again, we'll have to wait for the legislation to see.
The nastiest thing is that they're making it easier for copyright holders to sue, specifically by granting the courts powers to impose greater fines and penalties on infringers. I fully expect a wave of lawsuits from ARIA against grandmothers who don't own computers, etc., just as in the US. Bad news.
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.
Kazza was banned in australia because of laws pertaining to the creation of media formats. I wonder if this leaves the door to have that overturned and Kazza can begin supplying its software back on Australian shores.
In Australia, we have a law system inherited from the British. This basically means laws are applied at the discretion of the court. We have a criminal offence called "going equipped to commit arson" - which means you're carrying a lighter or matches. That law hasn't been enforced for a long time, I'm not sure if it was ever enforced. In America, no doubt people would be arrested much more frequently for this crime, because in America laws are enforced until abolished.
We live in a land where people aren't as litigation-happy, and as a result laws tend to be forgotten instead of being removed (for example, it is perfectly *legal* to urinate on the front right hand tyre of a car in public over here, but you'd probably be arrested for doing so). So this isn't really saying anything about our rights to copy and format-shift, and as was said above it's more to allow DMCA-type legislation to be enforced by American companies through our justice system.
The fact is, we never needed an update in our law system because no one's treated it as a big deal here. I'm sure if this sort of story was run here, most people would wonder why the media and government are stating the obvious.
If f'' is positive, but f' is large and negative, f could be nearing a singularity in the complex plane.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
After all, it doesn't matter much if it's legal to format shift but you can't buy hardware or content capable of doing it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If there was a way to not beam their stuff to people who weren't paying that cost the same as the current technology I'm sure they'd use it. Saying that media companies should give their work away for nothing due to the technological limitations of their broadcast equipment sounds pretty illogical to me.
It surprises me how often "Fair Use" is trotted out when it really only applies to the same circumstances here as it does there (educational, including criticism since it is informative).
The US presumed right to copy recordings you've bought to use them elsewhere stems from the home taping act and presumably from the Betamax case.
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Something long allowed under US copyright legislation
What crack are you smoking? Ever since the DMCA was passed, this has been effectively outlawed in the US.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
If media companies want to broadcast something -- throwing it out into what out to be a public resource (the managed EM spectrum) -- then they should have come up with a business model that didn't require a legislative solution that reduced citizens' rights to use their equipment as they see fit, in a non-interfering manner.
What the satellite providers did is took the public's airwaves and decided to apply the business model of a privately-owned medium (cable television) to them. Only unlike cable television, which has an argument for controlling access, satellite broadcasters do not, any more than your local VHF or UHF broadcaster should be able to say that you can only watch their channel if you own a particular brand of TV.
The satellite TV laws made something that you can do with nothing but a receiver and a box of circuits -- equipment that can't possibly interfere with or adversely affect others reception -- illegal. People talk about drug and vice laws as creating criminals out of basically harmless people: with the laws the broadcasters have managed to get passed, you can commit a host of federal offenses just by opening up a piece of equipment (which you own) and working on it in the right way with some basic tools.
Your post is indicative of how deeply ingrained their way of thinking has become: if a content provider wants to only deliver content to certain people, then they should only deliver it to those people. Buy the wires, buy the rights-of-way, and deliver the content. I don't particularly like the cable and telephone companies, but they at least have a solid argument for going after you when you climb up their pole and tap into their line.
But by allowing the satellite companies to do what they've done -- basically apply a legislative solution to a technological problem, and privatize a large swath of public resources to do so -- we've opened the door to a host of laws that create crimes where there were not crimes before ("anti-circumvention," even in some cases the dissemination of information that has to do with circumvention), and we've basically ensured that the future will be filled with more locked-down content, because it's so much more profitable. Why worry about selling advertising when you can sell subscriptions (or subscriptions AND ads)? You can make money from both ends that way.
In many cases we only allow the pay-per-use services to exist (or get started in the first place) because there are free alternatives. People shrug and tolerate pay-to-listen TV and radio, because they think they'll always have the free sources available. This is shortsighted: the business model of pay-to-listen is far more lucrative from a broadcaster's perspective, and we've seen it demonstrated that our laws gets changed to suit their whims. Free-to-air TV and radio: your days are numbered.
That we've been brainwashed in this country (and in most of the world, apparently) into thinking that it's right for companies to broadcast signals out into the ether, via the public airwaves, and pick and choose what people on the receiving end can do with them in a non-interfering fashion. Now that to me seems illogical.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But one can't circumvent for purposes of fair use without building or obtaining a circumvention device, which is prohibited in the United States and in countries whose copyright laws have been harmonised or harmonized with those of the United States.
If f'' is positive, but f' is large and negative, f could be nearing a singularity in the complex plane.
I think in that case, you're pretty much f'ed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Something certainly has killed or mortally wounded music in the last couple decades, but saying what would probably require a lot of research. Me, I'd incline toward the payola and merger frenzy, prima facie. Those things, after all, have verifiably led to fewer kinds of music getting public attention. It's possible that someone's livelihood was ruined -- and creative output stopped -- by hisher music being shared among huge numbers of people, but I haven't heard the tale yet.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
You don't own the airwaves on your property. The government auctioned them off on your behalf.
Since most media products don't automatically play themselves, format shifting is required. i.e. you have to shift the data from the DVD, through the player, into the TV, likely splitting out the audio along the way. Self contained hand held video games (NOT PSP or Game Boy types) and similar devices are the exception, but they're a small minority.
To say I can shift the output of a DVD to the TV of my choice, but not to a laptop (via the hard drive) is a distinction that shouldn't automatically be decided in favor of whatever the media company wants. An even finer split hair is allowing CDs to be ripped to an iPod, but not allowing DVDs to be ripped to a central home video server. How the legally obtained media is played back should be determined by the buyer, not the seller.
You'd definately need to incorporate some probability density function on election outcome into the equation.
Any country using Diebold voting machines can consider f(t) to be continuous without interval restrictions.
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
Yes. Although they're not fixed yet, things aren't going downhill so fast that no one has a chance to do anything. It would be nice if there weren't powerful entities screwing things up though. I'm not saying it couldn't be better.
In the FTA hearings the democrats (minor party in Aus) pushed for the introduction of Fair use into to counter-balance the DMCA provisions. The recommendations presented to the government include fair-use provisions
If you go back and read the public submissions, a large number of them were warning the government that DMCA without fair-use would unbalance the copyright laws.
lounge around on the blue couch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmite
I'm sorry, I just had to do that.
Long live the Aussies,
Defenders of our borders.
Cause if we go the other way,
There's only lots of water.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
And if you video something you have to erase it after you've watched it once.
And you can't lend a video to a friend or family.
All we've really done is swapped one absurd and unworkable rule for a new set of absurd and unworkable rules.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Couldn't resist....
This is a concession of the FTA with the US. Although this seems good we have to weigh this up with the DMCA laws that will be enforced as part of that FTA. In addition other aspects of Australia's relatively 'free-er' copyright laws will be bought down to the level of the US's, so this is a good thing for IP owners (and IP lawyers) and not such a good thing for everyone else.
Get either Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim discs. The latter is easily found [my favourite is the 16x DVD+R discs made by CMC -- look for the serif font used for OPEN <-> LOCK on the cakebox. Sans-serif indicates Prodisc.], but you can get Taiyo Yuden from:
Good luck.
"The problem with our economy is that our budget is balanced by people who aren't" - A.E.N.
Twits.
In short, people will continue doing what they're currently doing - ignoring the laws because they're dumb, and drawing their own lines as to what's right and wrong. Which isn't a good thing for *anyone*.
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
Marmite! Pester me not with this inferior sludge.
Vegemite is the food of champions, the perfect food. All you need for complete nutrition is a teaspoon of vegemite each day, possibly with a glass of orange juice, and perhaps a half-kilo of vegetables and a teensy 250g of lean meat.
The perfect foodstuff!