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.

Comments

Google should just block Australia

[iCEBaLM]

At this point Google search is so entrenched all they would have to do is block all of Australia from accessing it and the internet immediately becomes useless in Australia.

Re:Google should just block Australia

[bluefoxlucid]

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".)