"You might not know this, but mining is having devastating impacts on communities and the environment. Most mining in NSW is for coal. This is fuelling global climate change, which is critically endangering life on our planet. The NSW Minerals Council is now running a spin campaign to fool you into thinking that we need the coal mining industry. We invite you to dig a little deeper and find out the real facts."
Unfortunately this website has been forced to be taken down by the Axxs.org Collective due to Freehills lawyers for NSW Minerals Council using this piece of legislation :
which effectively Axxs.org Collective has to comply too, regardless of the legitimacy of the claim of copyright infringement.
The site was a fair use critical review parody site of the NSW Mining propaganda campaign, and brought you facts regarding what was wrong with it.
The statements by the solicitors for the NSW Minerals Council does not explicitly state what exactly is copyright :
"Content in which our client owns copyright may be viewed on it's website, http://www.nswmining.com.au./ We ask that you compare our client's website to the offending websites referred to above. On comparison, you will see the copyright infringement issues that our client has with the abovementioned websites."
As the intended recipient of the email, we disclose this information, so that others can see how from our point of view, critical review is being attacked using this piece of legislation.
When asking what exactly was copyright on the phone by one of the collective members, so that we may take it down promptly, and fulfill our obligations, we were told, 'All of it', everything. It was pointed out the source code was totally different, and was told it was copyright to their client, even though elements of the pages, on the site itself, where pointed out as to who the images etc belonged too. This is a very interesting claim, that custom php code by one of our users, images by other parties, the colours, the lot, is the intellectual property of NSW Minerals Council. We have been forced to take the site down by this legislation, as the solicitors pointed out that according to it, we must act appropriately on reciept of such an email, or have failed to fulfill our legal responsibilities. Hence we have done so.
naah not hard, I was just quickly putting down our point of view.. the threads here get so long and out of control, and i just posted a couple, but have to get back to the grind;) sigh too much to try and follow the threads and so short a coffee break! hehe
We got a very legal notice I assure you, as per the copyright act schedule.
We aren't trying to 'toe the line', in fact, we are a very progressive collective of activist geeks.
And we have also received similar with a government agency using the DMCA to do the same with another site, in the past 2 weeks, where the server farm host was threatened with the DMCA, and thus us with them threatening to take down the server if it was not removed. it was a parody image of a logo. The logo was changed, because there is just not the funds to mount a legal battle in the US over this.
twice in a few weeks..
DMCA / This law.. pretty much the same. The point is, here it is being used to quell dissent and used by folk with money against those that don't have the resources to even organise legal responses quickly. They are being abused.
We didn't roll over and die on this, we tried arguing it, but the lawyers said 'It doesn't matter if we are wrong or right, you have to abide by this law :
Which REQUIRES, that we pull the site, IRRESPECTIVE of ANYTHING. We just have to get a notice as per the regulations. I asked the solicitor exactly what was copyright, and she said ALL OF IT. as per the notice to us. This is just plain false. I pointed out the source code was different, she then pulled the statement about the above law.
Now, I don't know if you know, but the Mining companies in just NSW are a 21 billion dollar business. That's a lot of money to have hanging over a collective that does web-hosting voluntarily. These lawyers were ready to make sure we paid for not fullfilling our legal requirements. We tried fighting this, and came up against a money wall. a 21 billion dollar money wall.
Moving from the city to the country was a big eye-opener for me about the state of bandwidth in Australia... it's centralised around cities.. outside of that it's very poor... infrastructure is the problem.
These announcements mean little if anything for people outside of the major cities, as ADSL is only available to those few close enough to exchanges... Considering you can't seem to get an ADSL connection other than being under 5km from the exchange, if that.. most folk are on dialup. I connect from home on a 56k modem and the BEST i can hope to achieve is 26kbs.
Of course I am about 10 mins drive from a major rural township, not in it, but that's Australia for you;)
Slashdot Mirror
We did.
3 .php
/ cr1969242/s20j.html
As per the post here : http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2007/02/14109
it was replaced with :
"You might not know this, but mining is having devastating impacts on communities and the environment. Most mining in NSW is for coal. This is fuelling global climate change, which is critically endangering life on our planet. The NSW Minerals Council is now running a spin campaign to fool you into thinking that we need the coal mining industry. We invite you to dig a little deeper and find out the real facts."
Unfortunately this website has been forced to be taken down by the Axxs.org Collective due to Freehills lawyers for NSW Minerals Council using this piece of legislation :
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_reg
which effectively Axxs.org Collective has to comply too, regardless of the legitimacy of the claim of copyright infringement.
The site was a fair use critical review parody site of the NSW Mining propaganda campaign, and brought you facts regarding what was wrong with it.
The statements by the solicitors for the NSW Minerals Council does not explicitly state what exactly is copyright :
"Content in which our client owns copyright may be viewed on it's website, http://www.nswmining.com.au./ We ask that you compare our client's website to the offending websites referred to above. On comparison, you will see the copyright infringement issues that our client has with the abovementioned websites."
As the intended recipient of the email, we disclose this information, so that others can see how from our point of view, critical review is being attacked using this piece of legislation.
When asking what exactly was copyright on the phone by one of the collective members, so that we may take it down promptly, and fulfill our obligations, we were told, 'All of it', everything. It was pointed out the source code was totally different, and was told it was copyright to their client, even though elements of the pages, on the site itself, where pointed out as to who the images etc belonged too. This is a very interesting claim, that custom php code by one of our users, images by other parties, the colours, the lot, is the intellectual property of NSW Minerals Council. We have been forced to take the site down by this legislation, as the solicitors pointed out that according to it, we must act appropriately on reciept of such an email, or have failed to fulfill our legal responsibilities. Hence we have done so.
You do the math.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_reg/ cr1969242/s20j.html
naah not hard, I was just quickly putting down our point of view .. the threads here get so long and out of control, and i just posted a couple, but have to get back to the grind ;) sigh too much to try and follow the threads and so short a coffee break! hehe
cheers mate.
Read my post here : http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225234&cid =18244686
..
.. pretty much the same. The point is, here it is being used to quell dissent and used by folk with money against those that don't have the resources to even organise legal responses quickly. They are being abused.
We got a very legal notice I assure you, as per the copyright act schedule.
We aren't trying to 'toe the line', in fact, we are a very progressive collective of activist geeks.
And we have also received similar with a government agency using the DMCA to do the same with another site, in the past 2 weeks, where the server farm host was threatened with the DMCA, and thus us with them threatening to take down the server if it was not removed. it was a parody image of a logo. The logo was changed, because there is just not the funds to mount a legal battle in the US over this.
twice in a few weeks
DMCA / This law
Actually, your very wrong.
/ cr1969242/sch10.html
r 200412004n405376/sch1.html
r 200412004n405376/s2.html
We didn't roll over and die on this, we tried arguing it, but the lawyers said 'It doesn't matter if we are wrong or right, you have to abide by this law :
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_reg
Which REQUIRES, that we pull the site, IRRESPECTIVE of ANYTHING. We just have to get a notice as per the regulations. I asked the solicitor exactly what was copyright, and she said ALL OF IT. as per the notice to us. This is just plain false. I pointed out the source code was different, she then pulled the statement about the above law.
Now, I don't know if you know, but the Mining companies in just NSW are a 21 billion dollar business. That's a lot of money to have hanging over a collective that does web-hosting voluntarily. These lawyers were ready to make sure we paid for not fullfilling our legal requirements. We tried fighting this, and came up against a money wall. a 21 billion dollar money wall.
And for those that think this can't happen in the US, your very wrong. We have the Australian-US Free Trade Agreement to thank for section 20j (the takedown clause):
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_reg/ca
notice this:
COPYRIGHT AMENDMENT REGULATIONS 2004 (No. 1) 2004 No. 405 - REG 2
Commencement
These Regulations commence on the commencement of item 191 of Schedule 9
to the US Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act 2004 .
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_reg/ca
Moving from the city to the country was a big eye-opener for me about the state of bandwidth in Australia ... it's centralised around cities .. outside of that it's very poor ... infrastructure is the problem.
.. Considering you can't seem to get an ADSL connection other than being under 5km from the exchange, if that .. most folk are on dialup. I connect from home on a 56k modem and the BEST i can hope to achieve is 26kbs.
;)
These announcements mean little if anything for people outside of the major cities, as ADSL is only available to those few close enough to exchanges.
Of course I am about 10 mins drive from a major rural township, not in it, but that's Australia for you