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Aussies Brace for DMCA
Rusty writes "Aussies are counting down to the introduction of the US-FTA-required DMCA legislation, and trying to pressure the government to listen to consumers and innovators, not just industrial copyright holders. Linux Australia has kicked off the campaign with iownmydvds.org
and iownmymusic.org."
Call me a cynic, but i've seen unequivocal evidence from the EU member nations that these elitists don't give a damn about what their own peoples have to say.
*shameless plug* check my sig for details. */shameless plug*
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
After the DMCA in the USA...i ve) in the EU...
After the 2001 EUCD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Copyright_Direct
After the 2006 DADVSI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DADVSI) in France...
What "US-FTA-required DMCA legislation"?
THIS Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement Article 17.4 section 7 details virtually the exact text of the US DMCA anti-circumvention law and section 8 details virtually the exact text of the US DMCA rights management information law, and reqires the Australian government to pass virtually that exact DMCA text into AU law.
7. (a) In order to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms use in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorised acts in respect of their works, performances, and phonograms, each Party shall provide that any person who:
(i) knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know, circumvents without authority any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram, or other subject matter; or
(ii) manufactures, imports, distributes, offers to the public, provides, or otherwise traffics in devices, products, or components, or offers to the public, or provides services that:
(A) are promoted, advertised, or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of any effective technological measure;
(B) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any effective technological measure; or
(C) are primarily designed, produced, or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of any effective technological measure,
shall be liable and subject to the remedies specified in Article 17.11.13. Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied where any person is found to have engaged wilfully and for the purposes of commercial advantage or financial gain in any of the above activities. Each Party may provide that such criminal procedures and penalties do not apply to a non-profit library, archive, educational institution, or public non-commercial broadcasting entity.
(b) Effective technological measure means any technology, device, or component that, in the normal course of its operation, controls access to a protected work, performance, phonogram, or other protected subject matter, or protects any copyright.
(c) In implementing sub-paragraph (a), neither Party shall be obligated to require that the design of, or the design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as the product does not otherwise violate any measures implementing sub-paragraph (a).
(d) Each Party shall provide that a violation of a measure implementing this paragraph is a separate civil or criminal offence and independent of any infringement that might occur under the Party's copyright law.
(e) Each Party shall confine exceptions to any measures implementing sub-paragraph (a) to the following activities, which shall be applied to relevant measures in accordance with sub-paragraph (f):
(i) non-infringing reverse engineering activities with regard to a lawfully obtained copy of a computer program, carried out in good faith with respect to particular elements of that computer program that have not been readily available to the person engaged in those activities, for the sole purpose of achieving interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs;
(ii) non-infringing good faith activities, carried out by an appropriately qualified researcher who has lawfully obtained a copy, unfixed performance, or display of a work, performance, or phonogram and who has made a good faith effort to obtain authorisation for such activities, to the extent necessary for the sole purpose of identifying and analysing flaws and vulnerabilities of technologies for scrambling and descrambling of information;
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The FTA had nothing to do with import and export levels, that was peripheral. It was about selling us BS "intellectual property" in return for limiting the US farming subsidies so our economy that's still based so heavily in primary induustry doesn't fall over.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Austalian politics would look weird in the USA - the federal government is made up of coalition of a populist right wing party that calls themselves the "Liberal" party combined with an agrarian socialist party who are far to the left on rural issues and far to the right on city issues. They do not have control of any state - so there has been a power struggle between state and federal government for years and their opponents are funded to a great extent by the trade unions and the Federal government is at this point trying to make the unions irrelevant to starve the opposition with some success. Generally Austalia does actually take a more liberal view than the USA on a lot of issues - due to most of the services and all of the domestic law enforcement being a duty of the states and due to many of the ruling federal party deciding that conservatism means doing nothing. Where the federal government has full responisbility, like immigration, the different ideology shows - with residency visas granted after donations to the party at one end and rapid mistaken deportation of our own citizens to countries at the other, and the officials responsible getting a bonus for each deportation (why check the paperwork when you can personally make more money rushing things through and there is no personal accountability?). There are some things a government should not be allowing the profit motive to interfere with for the good of the state - the for profit immigration detention centres were both a disgrace and a huge drain on the nations revenues. The USA may joke about pound me in the ass prisons, but in Australia male prisioners were raping female prisioners held in the same facility with no way to lock their doors and stop the same thing happening over and over.