Australians Allowed to Format Shift Media 155
An anonymous reader writes "Australian Federal law will now allow format shifting of media (ie:Ripping CDs to MP3s). Something long allowed under US copyright legislation, but only now coming to the Land Down Under." From the article: "Once the new laws are passed, 'format shifting' of music, newspapers and books from personal collections onto MP3 players will become legal. The new laws will also make it legal for people to tape television and radio programs for playback later, a practice currently prohibited although millions of people regularly do it. Under the current regime, millions of households a day are breaking the law when they tape a show and watch it at another time."
A victory in the right direction. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd gloat, but for the little voice back there... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, the Australians may be lagging behind, but at least they're moving in the right direction. Sometimes it seems like we hit the high-water mark of consumer rights in this country, and are now starting to go the other way. That pretty much takes the fun out of all the holier-than-thou comments.
My personal feeling is that the laws here with regards to content and media jumped the shark when they said it was illegal to decode certain satellite broadcasts. To me, this is illogical: they're beaming their transmissions onto my property. Why shouldn't I be able to put up an antenna, feed it into a receiver, and do whatever the hell I want with the resulting output? If you want to pick a particular moment when the FCC stopped being an agent of the public interest and instead became an organ of the media distribution companies, that's it. It's pretty much a direct line of descent from those rulings, to the DMCA and its anti-circumvention rules, to things yet to come like the broadcast flag. I truly believe that at some point in the future (which I doubt I'll live to see) people will look back at the early satellite TV scrambling/demodulation laws (and their enforcement) as a turning point in public policy.
Phillip Ruddock (Score:4, Interesting)
Australian LAW Interesting History (Score:1, Interesting)
Australia enacted a law in response to that but codified much stricter details than the US laws.
Stupid but true. (According to a Lawyer speaking on the subject many years ago... 12 years! YIKES!)
I guess this is a bit of a pendulum swinging slightly. I guess the more restrictive laws would inevitably become more problematic with the pace of change of technology in this space since.
Re:A victory in the right direction. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the same in Britain, where a person's rights of "fair dealing" generally are not specifically enumerated but are left for the courts to determine {though I believe it's already been held that recording a TV programme is legal if your TV licence was paid up at the time of recording and you only keep it for 28 days; I don't have a citation for this, and I think this would effectively outlaw the use of DVD+R media for TV recording, but you can still buy one-time-write media so make of that what you will}.
It certainly sounds as though this move is intended to pre-empt a court ruling. If they legalise it specifically now, they can regulate it tightly and include nasty provisions like "..... unless specifically prevented by technological measures" {clue: this gets around even the Sony rootkit [linux-live.org] and can be used to rip protected or unprotected CDs even on a computer which is already infected}. If they wait for a court case which will legalise it generally, then they can't include such measures. Theoretically, even anything not specifically allowed under this new law could still be held to constitute fair dealing anyway -- but the ease of getting away with disobeying an unjust law is dependent on the perceived injustice in the law disobeyed, and until you think about it for five minutes this does sound fair.
Finally (Score:3, Interesting)
At one place I work it is a (much hated) policy that certain digital music files are not allowed on the network. This is to protect my place of work from lawsuits. I work in a sysadmin role, and if I find any such files, I'm obligated to delete them. You can imagine how much I love it when someone needs their PC fixed, I run into a set of MP3s, and they seem to be legit (ie. a rip from one CD I've seen in their office). I have to delete them, and explain that they can't have them due to the stupid policy, that I've actually removed them, but if it were up to me I would have left them there. Argh!
When new laws such as these are in place maybe they can ditch that ridiculous policy. It's one part I hate about my job.
Attempting to prevent this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Phillip Ruddock (Score:2, Interesting)
Crime reduction techniques... (Score:3, Interesting)
From another perspective when the masses are doing something regardless of the man made laws saying not to, then it is politically wise to go along so long as there are no real victims.
In the early 1990's the Pope gave into Galileos thoughts about the earth revolving around the sun, because they were losing followers with their misguided teachings.
Look at France and you'll see what is gonna happen (Score:3, Interesting)
No week after that law went into existance, it was toppled. Now the rule says you can, unless you're circumventing some DRM (ha, ha. Comes close to "you may copy CDs, but only when there's no copy protection". But since all of them are protected...).
In other words, I'm quite sure we'll see some heavy lobbying, followed by a reduction of this law into senselessness.
Re:A victory in the right direction. (Score:3, Interesting)
Australian politicians (Howard) are yet to gain absolute power like yank pollies (bush) so they would face an uproar if they really tried to enforce something as stupid as the DCMA. Australia has a lot of stupid or outdated laws but the majority of them are not enforced.
We have removed a Prime Minister for the abuse of power. "God save the queen because nothing can save the Governor General" - Gough Whitlam.