Draconian Anti-Piracy Law Looms Over Australia 436
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."
Well, that's simple! (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple. Greed, those who stand to benefit from it, greed.
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Now he appears to be doing the same on his vendetta against free speech and copyright.
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... that is a vassal of Great Britain, and the United States.
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ZUNE is illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
"Will I be able to share my music collection with a friend?
No. You will not be able to sell, loan or give away any format-shift copy you make in a different format, but a friend can listen to your music with you."
That means the Zune 3 day sharing is illegal!
They almost made Linux illegal too (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Well, that's simple! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well, that's simple! (Score:4, Insightful)
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
Bad News
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If
The Future
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas
Same-ness was unenforcable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of
Total Criminalization
Based on the principle that
If we were All crooks
We could at least be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of
The Law
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
Real Crime
So new laws were manufactored
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President
The most excalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
Total Criminalization
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be
Tricked Into It
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal.
--Frank Zappa (from the booklet of Joe's Garage, Acts II & III - 1979)
Obligatory Ayn Rand (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Country [wikipedia.org]
Sounds about right.
think of it this way (Score:3, Funny)
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Not unless you want to hear Rolf Harris or Vegemite Regae playing it!
A few years ago a TV show got a different band in each week to play it - and I had the cassete of 20 versions of it as the only thing to play on a 1000km long road trip. I have no idea where my passenger hid it after the trip - never saw it again.
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A Bridge Too Far (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A Bridge Too Far (Score:5, Insightful)
The Jury system is designed in such a way that jury nullification is inherent to the system. Nobody can prevent it, not even the Judge. The most that he can do is set aside the Jury's verdict and hold a new trial.
It's a mixed bag for sure, as juries can allow bad people to get away with crimes, but (and I took this from Wikipedia) as "John Adams said of jurors: 'It is not only his right but also his duty... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.'"
So, yea, you're wrong. It is a Jury's right and if you are willing to listen to one of the founding father's, it is a Juror's duty.
Jury nullification, jury duty (Score:3, Informative)
What they can do is ask jurors during voir dire whether they'll vote to convict if that's where the facts point, and exclude from the jury anyone who intends to vote on whether they approve of the law.
In other words, the six or twelve people deciding whether you go to jail for violating $UNJUST_LAW are either unwilling to practice jury nullification, or they're dishonest enough to lie under oath.
If you've been called for jury duty you've heard exactly that quest
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Last time I served on a Jury... (Score:3, Informative)
The judge said that after the jury selection was finalized, he would make all the jurors swear an oath to the effect of basing their decision on the law, the evidence, and nothing else. I got eliminated, so I didn't
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the rights agencies usually pursue the infringer in civil court.
in the American federal system, only 2% of tort cases are settled by a trial.
you don't even get to ask for a jury trial in an american civil court unless there is a significant factual question remaining to be decided.
if your defense on the facts collapses like a house of cards---
it is within the judge's right to declare th
I'm not worried (Score:4, Funny)
Well, given that that Draco died in the 6th century BC, I doubt he'll have much luck enforcing his law.
unleash the history majors (Score:2)
Re:I'm not worried (Score:5, Insightful)
this truely is rushed.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Civil Disobedience (Score:4, Insightful)
"Kid, whad'ya get?"
I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $1,320 and stop singing"
He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?"
And I said, "Singing 'Happy Birthday'"
And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand,
and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing,
father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the
bench.
Apologies to Arlo Guthrie.
--
BMO
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+1 Alice's Restaurant (Score:2)
Proud to be an Aussie (Score:2)
Proud to be an American, too. (Score:3, Insightful)
Notwithstanding the ridiculousness of having a 'work for hire' last longer than a work by a natural person, that's a pretty long span of American history that it would have been more or less unavai
Re:Proud to be an Aussie (Score:5, Funny)
Truly, (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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www.anvilstudio.com"
I am, for one:
http://musicians.opensrc.org/DrewRoberts [opensrc.org]
May I suggest considering a copyleft type license for your Free music?
Oh and as to programs, people might check:
http://lmms.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://ardour.org/ [ardour.org]
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ [rosegardenmusic.com]
http://www.ferventsoftware.com/ [ferventsoftware.com]
Turns out Happy Birthday IS protected by copyright (Score:5, Informative)
Howard's a cunt (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Howard's a cunt (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Howard's a cunt (Score:5, Funny)
Overbreadth (Score:2)
In American jurisprudence, it is an established precedent that taking it on faith that an overbroad law will not be used in an overbroad manner does not save it from challenges to Constitutionality -- that is, when the government says, "Sure, we COULD use it to arrest families singing 'Happy Birthday', but honest, we won't!", the courts say, "Try again, sucker!". How do Australian courts view the issue of overbreadth?
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The australian constitution doesn't have any real equivalent to the bill of rights.
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Not that I wouldn't mind a little RICO being applied to the RIAA.
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Not sure about the Patriot Act. The courts have gotten wonky in later years. Really, by all standards of precedent, it should have been shredded.
My statement was based on the reasoning in Reno vs. ACLU (http://www2.epic.org/cda/cda_d
Let it be enacted.. (Score:2)
Simple Solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a simple solution: don't have anything to do with anything whose copyright is owned by ARIA and friends.
I've already put the word out to our extended family. No licensed products for our newborn son. Pooh Bear, Thomas the Tank Engine, Disney anything. All these trojan horses will be refused. I will allow the original books my Milne and Awdry, that's where Pooh and Thomas belong, in the books by their original authors. My son will be brought up in the knowledge that these are characters in a book, to live in his imagination, not on his lunchbox, bed sheets, or anything else. Licensed products are just too dangerous to have anything to do with.
From this point on I aim to only listen to copylefted music. Movies and TV? I'd rather have fun making a copylefted movie than killing my brain cells and liberty with an MPAA offering.
Maybe right after we have written to out politicians we should hold a protest in Sydney? Everyone brings their Pooh Bears and Disney characters, CDs, DVDs and we have a great big "cleansing" where we burn them in the streets and pledge to lead fruitful "copylefted lives"?
Customers becoming ex-customers. Now that would scare ARIA. If we can do it to Microsoft we can do it to the RIAA, MPAA and ARIA.
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If you believe that you can make any kind of difference to the masses with a move like getting people to give up licenced popular culture due to unfair IP laws, then go for it; it's a good goal, but I think you might be understating the difficulty of converting even one person just a bit.
Do you have plans? An idea without a plan generally doesn't amount to much. How do you intend to achieve your goals? Warning friends and family that you won't accept the gifts you mentioned and then
Re:Simple Solution... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think I need a plan. If I do it and my position makes sense others will follow. If my position is sensible the chances are that others already have the same idea and are working in the same direction.
By making it sound like my idea, my goals (and consequently that I must have a plan to spread it) you pay me far too much credit. I'm just on a path that thousands of people like Richard Stallman are already walking. A better description is that the actions of my government are causing my path to more closely follow the footsteps of those ahead of me.
Over the last decade, since I first learned of GNU, I've been slowly coming to the realisation that Stallman, FSF and the GNU have got it pretty right [gnu.org]. This isn't about software, convenience or better models of development. It's about the philosphy [gnu.org] and mind set.
I don't have to convince others. All I have to do is let them know that there is an alternative and what that alternative is. The opponents of copyleft will see to the convincing.
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RMS has a lot of really good ideas, but he is, to be perfectly honest, a raving nut job. He lives in an ideal world where there is no pragamatism, no compromise, where everyone can do what they love without having to worry about putting food on the table. He believes that because many people in the US are willing to work crap jobs for no money, that programmers should be willing to work for $35,000 a year(that's not an exaggeratio
Re:Simple Solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the RIAA etc make stuff you want, they get to set the terms. The trick is not to redefine the terms but to make your own stuff.
Re:Simple Solution... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is something in this language I find chilling---and all too familiar.
The voice of the fanatic to whom all culture is alien --- verboten --- whose creation does not meet his own standards of perfection.
When did freedom ever come from a burning of the books?
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There is something in this language I find chilling---and all too familiar.
It's different this time (honest). This is not some protest against degenerate culture - this is a protest against corporations who own our culture in a literal sense. When nothing produced in the last 70+ years has entered the public domain unless placed there deliberately, we have a serious problem. I should be able to sing happy birthday and play old bugs bunny cartoons free of charge and also pass copies around if I so desire.
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When the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall came down, a huge amount of books were burned - books which the Soviet secret police had put together, detailing people's thoughts, words and deeds which were deemed a threat to that twisted state. Burning those books definitely freed many innocent people from the threat of someone using those records against them.
Burning some Disney DVDs is surely within the rights of the owner of th
Use the 'net, Luke... (Score:3, Informative)
"Recent Government reviews have resulted in the proposed introduction of the Copyright Amendment (Exceptions, Enforcement and Other Measures) Bill in the Autumn sitting of 2006 [mondaq.com]. The proposed new legislation will be designed to bring Australian copyright laws up to speed and implement outcomes for the 2005 reviews."
I'm at a total loss to understand why anyone would find it difficult to uncover background on this topic...
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'Cos Aussie "news" sucks (Score:2)
I base this sweeping generalisation on "The Age" website and the newspapers that I browse in hotels there.
They do, however, do an amazingly good Linux conference...
Vik
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The Obvious reason they're doing this (Score:2, Informative)
Happy birthday to you, you belong in a zoo (Score:2)
Australian Copyright Agency website/submissions (Score:2, Informative)
Please be constructive in dealing with the copyright agency. While I may have a different agenda to theirs, they are still a helpfull organisation.
From this document
What can I do?
You can submit your concerns on the Copyright Amendment Bill 2006: Exceptions and other Digital Agenda review measures directly to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constituti
Paying Our Way (Score:2)
The government needs to tax those extra royalties to pay for the hunt for Osama. The last place we'd expect to find him is at an Oz zoo singing Happy Birthday, so of course that's where we have to look. Last place after a VIP bar in Tahiti, but I'm applying for the grants to look there.
Its all the nets fault? (Score:2)
Sell it in the USA, then clean up the same old film and dump it in Australia many months later.
Video, tv, dvd's ect would get the time shift. Closed, safe, tested and a nice profit+ stream for established players.
I think this is more the last big push by local players to get some control back.
You want the full profit from licences,royalties go with an established player to get the full support of the bureau
Inevitable As Long As You Don't Understand (Score:2)
Just as "war is the health of the state" externally so "crime is the health of the state" internally.
It's that simple.
And it's always done for the benefit of a few. The "few" may change from time to time, as one group rises and another falls, but it's always a few.
Get a clue or keep playing the same old game "f
Just another day under the Liberals (Score:2)
I can probably help you out there. It's called corruption. Howard's Liberals are 2nd only to Dubya's Republicans at this game. The problem is that the Liberals are much better at covering their tracks. It's a very rare occasion, eg AWB ( Australian Weapons-For-Oil scandal ), that they get caught out.
If only Labor offered an alternative
Possibly American Tactics (Score:2)
One possible explanation for laws like these are that they are encouraged by the American cartels (RIAA, MPAA) as ways to eventually extend US copyright. A major justifaction for the Copyright T [wikipedia.org]
Gee, let me think... (Score:2)
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.
If it were me, I'd rush laws like this in, with as little roof for public debate as possible. I'd also go out of my way to make the most insanely draconian DRM measures manditory in all consumer electronics and force consumers to return/submit any and all non-drm'ed devices... why?
Because until copyright law (and especially, copyrigh
It's obvious! We're STUPID! (Score:2)
err, 4 times. (Score:3, Funny)
Draconian (Score:3, Insightful)
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The counter-point would be that here in the well armed US of A, we have the DMCA.
LK
Re:Get ready, mate. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Americans (Score:5, Informative)
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United States of Brazil -> Brazil
United States of Mexico -> Mexico
United States of America -> America
Re:Get ready, mate. (Score:4, Insightful)
And to expect enforcement to tend in the opposite direction!
I believe that legislators who truly value liberty--such as the founding fathers of the USA--will indeed err on the side of caution, because they know that zealous law enforcers, prosecutors, and politicians will try to abuse the laws as far as they can when it suits them.
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it's actually not. (Score:2)
It's not part pf the public domain, surprisingly, which is why the Draconians are so pissed off. How else did you think a race of spacefaring reptilians paid for all their starships?
Re:it isn't that bad... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:it isn't that bad... (Score:5, Funny)
Happy birthday to you
This song's seventy-two
But each time I sing it
I still must pay you
- RG>
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The lyrics (not the tune) were copyrighted in 1935. And like Mickey Mouse, Congress's continual extension of copyright term has kept the copyright valid (It's currently set to expire in 2030).
FYI: The copyright is currently held by Time/Warner. According to ASCAP, T/W receives approximately $2 million a year in royalties on said song.
Is it? (Score:2)
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Yeah, We have heaps of free speach we rule! (Score:3, Informative)
From the article " But because the sex is real, it is classified X18+, a rating that means it is banned from sale in all states." (hey and I probably just broke that new copyright law...
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Dude, could you honestly describe *any* sex in a porno film/mag/website as 'real' sex? Its as contrived as hell and is produced purely for the camera; it only has to *look* like fun not actually *be* fun for the people doing it.
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Well, I'm an American too, and I'm proud of what my country once was. I'm less proud of what it has become. All I can say is
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Canada? Does that count as 'English language'?
Or have you heard of a place called 'New Zealand'? Small set of islands to the East of Australia...
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Because, since "happy birthday" does fall under copyright [wikipedia.org], and distributing something under copyright is illegal, it just is an actual, plausible case:
The company holding the copyright was purchased by Warner Chappell in 1990 for $15 million dollars, with the value of "Happy Birthday" estimated at $5 million. [1] While the current copyright status o
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Maybe they won't, but the point is that they could do this under the legislation as it is currently drafted, and the AG is refusing to remove strict liability criminal provisions against individuals in a non-commercial context - he's effectively just saying "trust me".
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