Draconian Anti-Piracy Law Looms Over Australia

ccozan writes to tell us of a law being rushed through the Australian legislature that would criminalize great swaths of the citizenry. The Internet Industry Association of Australia is posting warning scenarios spelling out how far-reaching this law would be. From the release: "A family who holds a birthday picnic in a place of public entertainment (for example, the grounds of a zoo) and sings 'Happy Birthday' in a manner that can be heard by others, risks an infringement notice carrying a fine of up to $1,320. If they make a video recording of the event, they risk a further fine for the possession of a device for the purpose of making an infringing copy of a song... The US Free Trade Agreement does not require Australia to go down this path, and neither US nor European law contain such far-reaching measures. We are at a total loss to understand how this policy has developed, who is behind it and why there is such haste in enacting it into law — with little if any public debate."

Comments

Truly,

[the_REAL_sam]

The love of money is the root of all evil.

It's time to route the music supply AROUND the RIAA, just the same way a person would route AROUND a circuit that poses a fire hazard.

In the long run, greed will greed itself out of existance as publically created free music replaces "go-to-jail" / "pay-the-fines" music.

Hmm. Of course...who's working on that free music again?

www.anvilstudio.com

Howard's a cunt

[Bob Gelumph]

Normally on slashdot, there are thought-provoking topics that trigger much debate and such, but it's all pretty clear in this case.

Re:Howard's a cunt

[Frogbert]

Please don't mod the parent down, he is totally correct in his assertion.

Howard needs to be taken down a notch. He has been in power a long time and will probably be in power for a few more years. John Howard pulls this shit all the time, he just brings in lame laws that protect American interests and we Australians will just have to deal with it.

Australian politics is in a bad way at the moment. Howard's liberal party holds a majority in both houses of parliament and is using this majority to make all manor of broad sweeping changes. The worst part is that the leader of the opposition is incredibly unpopular, so it seems likely that the Liberals would win in the next election anyway.

As it stands the only way these laws, or any others, will be stopped is if a member or two crosses the floor.

Regardless the fact is that everyone will ignore these stupid laws like they have been for the past decade.

In summary, John Howard is indeed a cunt.

They almost made Linux illegal too

[EmbeddedJanitor]

because the kernel source says "fuck" in a few places, and there was a proposal to make it illegal to convey profanities via the internet.

Re:Well, that's simple!

[burntogold]

It's not about greed...

It's about a lust for power. As a libertarian, I tend to be fair to capitalism, as long as it stays within the boundaries of good ethics.

During the industrial revolution and earlier part of the last century, it was more simple. Your mind designed something- a lightbulb, the first radio, you produced a prototype, you hired people to produce more, and you got paid based on the value of your ideas, and the value of your products - the catch being that competetors are too. You build a mousetrap, and if they build a better one... well, the power's in the hands of the customers.

Then we evolved mass media advertising, technology, and non-tangible goods, and things became more complicated. Market visibility becomes an issue as the marketplace becomes wider. So little people who are hardworking and make good products and want to compete start hiring the big people to help them with this... some to help them become visible, and others as a shield help to protect them legally. This becomes more and more of a corporate thing, and the little people tend to become just visible enough to get bought out, and the larger companies show off what the little companies did and say "see, we can take credit for this now." In the meantime the little company sadly, in some cases, mutates to the form of "productivity" the new parent company had: producing mostly crap, but lots of it.

Then you get people like the RIAA, doing this for musicians or the movie industry. But with digital media becoming prevalent, they don't have as much to hold on to.

At the billion dollar level, it's not about the few hundred thousand. It's about control. File sharing deals a blow because the most popular files are the easiest ones to find... the catch being if you want to find music by an obscure enough artist, you *have* to buy it. This eventually leads to musicians who are outside the "current realm of control" getting enough money to do things like produce videos, which gets them seen... which is a threat if they don't have a sellout pricetag. The RIAA doesn't want enough competetors joining together to produce a bigger competetor that could take them down off their high mountain.

Good capitalism wants its competitor to have enough of a chance to make life interesting, but will work hard to beat it. This "working hard" should not involve dirty tricks or absolute control of the media outlets used to advertise, but the problem here is that the industry in question IS the media. It turns business into little more than politics, which is part of why the american system is in need of reform.

This is all IMHO, though, since I'm neither a lawyer nor in the media.