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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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
No... the law here previously stated that the only fair use for copying was for educational, etc. purposes... The law hadn't changed since the 1960's. The issue was that the law explicitly stated that you couldn't make copies. So, now the law has a fair use clause like the one in the States, and all is now good in the world of CD Ripping
"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.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
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?
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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."