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Australia Shelves Copyright Safe Harbor For Google, Facebook (torrentfreak.com)
In a surprise setback for companies such as Google and Facebook that leverage user-generated content, Australia has dropped plans to extend its copyright safe harbor provisions. From a report: In a blow to Google, Facebook and others, the government dropped the amendments before they were due to be introduced to parliament yesterday. That came as a big surprise, particularly as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had given the proposals his seal of approval just last week. "Provisions relating to safe harbor were removed from the bill before its introduction to enable the government to further consider feedback received on this proposal whilst not delaying the passage of other important reforms," Communications Minister Mitch Fifield said in a statement. There can be little doubt that intense lobbying from entertainment industry groups played their part, with a series of articles published in News Corp-owned The Australian piling on the pressure in favor of rightsholders.
The fun part comes when Google starts obeying all the little wishlist things and so rightsholders's stuff stops getting as much visibility, thus sales.
Copyright is valid. Making a car requires an enormous capital investment for equipment, plus a ton of labor per-vehicle; the engineering expense to design that car is millions of dollars, and the production of that car is enormous. The Chevrolet Volt sold 21,000 units in 2012 and 25,000 in 2013, at MSRPs around $40,000; that's $840 million and $1,000 million. At below 20% gross profit margins, that's over $672 million and $800 million of production costs. By contrast, making music requires large amounts of labor to compose, perform, record, and master; making copies of music requires pennies per thousand copies and a capital start-up cost of a $400 PC you probably already own.
Given the above, copyright obviously requires protection. The impact of partial copyright compromise is non-obvious even to many marketing executives: illegal things like playing your radio loud enough for others to hear in public cause people to buy your song, even though these things also compromise your ability to charge money for performance in that context. Focusing too hard on protection of rights will lead to loss of the benefits conferred by those rights, just as if you protected the right to remain silent by prosecuting anyone who speaks without first raising his hand.
(By "rights" I of course mean "protections provided by laws which may be changed to expand, diminish, or extinguish their scope after appropriate legal process".)
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I've lost count, but over the years I've seen many people make exactly that argument toward various other countries. If I remember correctly, Google should have blocked:
- The UK, because they demanded porn and piracy filters
- Most of the EU (definitely France, Germany and Belgium), because they DARED to ask Google to pay their taxes... and also because of porn and piracy filters
- Russia, again, porn filters (notice the pattern)
- Turkey, because they demanded Google to block everything nasty (mostly porn)
- China, because they demanded Google to comply with their Great Firewall rules and be a good citizen and report dissidents (surprisingly, nothing about porn, but, unsurprisingly, Google folded and agreed to that, even though it betray every shred of principle they might have claimed to have)
- The USA, because of PRISM
- And now, Australia. Ostensibly because of IP laws (but I'm thinking people are just concerned about the porn).
I might have missed a few countries there, feel free to add them.