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Australia To Legalize VCR Recording and CD Ripping 352
paritosh writes "While the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to stop the assault of anti-consumer intellectual property laws, Australia is breaking free from them." From the article: "See, it is currently illegal in Australia to record shows off the telly, or to transferbangle (Australian for copy) music from CDs to portable music players. The end result is that a large portion of of the Australian citizenry are technically breaking the law, and while that may not sit poorly with a nation born of criminality, it makes the legal system look a tad bit ridiculous. Could you imagine shipping all of those offenders to Madagascar?"
Ahead in time. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ahead in time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Australia is simply catching up - this isn't a step past where we are now. We can already legally record onto VCRs and rip CD's, no?
OTOH, this article does show that australia is willing to take an opposing stance to the normal sort of DRM mishmash going around the rest of the world.
This is a dupe, too, iirc.
Re:Ahead in time. (Score:2)
Re:Ahead in time. (Score:2)
Right NOW it's sort of, more or less, in some situations, legal, but it's moving towards being illegal. Sounds like Australia has taken a step in the other direction. So though you're right, Australia seems to be closer to the bad, they're moving away from it, not towards.
Re:Ahead in time. (Score:2)
"nation born of criminality" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"nation born of criminality" (Score:3, Insightful)
The original Australian colonists may have been criminals, but it is inaccurate to say that they were, even at the very beginning, a nation of criminals.
Re:"nation born of criminality" (Score:2)
Re:You never met an australian I take it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You never met an australian I take it (Score:2, Funny)
D'oh (Score:2, Informative)
When he said they're called Hungry Jacks, he meant it literally.
Re:"nation born of criminality" (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"nation born of criminality" (Score:2)
> They had female guards?
Of course [wikimedia.org]!
Will this come to fruition? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard promises from politicians every time I open a paper or turn on the news -- and those promises never bear fruit. I'm no Austrialian, but I wonder if this law that will "give" you a right (rights aren't granted by law) is really all they say it is, or if it is just a shill for the copyright-supporting cartels in some way.
I guess only time will tell. I don't trust it and I don't believe it will help consumers in the long run, but here is one place I want to be proven wrong (with time!)
I'm going to go out on a limb (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of laws in every country that are either not enforced, or are unenforceable because they're outdated and/or nobody knows it's illegal.
In this case, Australians can get away with transferring music to portable players because no one is enforcing the law.
The most draconian laws in the world are irrelevant if there is no will to enforce them at their highest level.
Re:Will this come to fruition? (Score:2)
That's a given, sad to say. A chief job of the politician is to deceive. At the onset of the Republican control of Congress, we were deceived into believing that Republicans represent less government. Of course, that's only true when the Republicans are in the minority - but when they do get their hand on the wheel, money flows like water runs. Politicians don't get elected to office bec
Re:Will this come to fruition? (Score:3, Informative)
This is exactly what Australian copyright law says right now*, and I don't see that changing soon. The idea is to add a fair use clause; considering the US has had such a provision for some time without affecting the profitability of the entertainment industry, I think the Australian entertainment industry will have a hard time supplying plausible arguements against such a change.
The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue (both here in the U.S. and in Australia) has less to do with the rights of the individual as it does with undue corporate influence in government. I don't know about Australia, but for a very long time the United States permitted limited duplication of copyrighted works by individuals. Fair use, and all that. Then, at the behest of some very large corporations that right was effectively nullified (oh sure, technically we still have it but in practice we don't
The US has legalized murder. (Score:2)
In many states - If you kill us, we kill you back;)
Re:The US has legalized murder. (Score:2)
Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:3, Informative)
This has not been because they believe that this is the best "model" or solution, but because they have been arm twisted by the US government and it's shill the WTO. They in essence get denied "free trade" with the US unless they tow the party line.
But some emerging economies like India, China and even Russia are stepping back and taking another look. And asking do we really
Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:3, Interesting)
And who's fault is that? The world is full of bullies: if you can't stand up to a bully it's your problem, not his. More to the point, however, is the fact that corporate influence is just as big an issue in other countries as it is in the U.S., and the adopti
Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:4, Insightful)
It might be a problem for "you" - but the bully is obviously at fault. Why does the bully get a free pass, and the blame transferred to the victim? I guess victims of genocide are at fault for not standing up to people with weapons while they remain defenseless.
Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:2)
"And copyright holders are, after all, part of those people you're talking about. It would be very shortsighted of us to ignore their needs since they create things that we want!"
Good point. Let's also keep in mind that musicians, authors, and poets traditionally make the lowest average income of any profession. How sad that many people want to marginalize them into oblivion. "I'll make copies of your work for free, and you'll have to fend for yourself by doing concerts and live readings -- well, goo
Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:2)
"I'll make copies of your work for free, and you'll have to fend for yourself by doing concerts and live readings -- well, good luck with that!"
I thought you were talking about the publishers and recording industry there, then I realized that you didn't include anything about interfering with creative control.
Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:2)
I'd agree with that, if every member of the public were capable of forming a rational decision based on a fully informed view on every issue. Unfortunately, that's simply not practical. There are too many fields with laws applying for everyone to know everything about them. Also, a significant proportion of the population simply isn't smart enough to act in their own interests when it comes to more complex laws (this isn't a criticism of those people, it's simply a fact).
I believe that this is why the mos
Re:The rest of the world(and in particular the US) (Score:2)
For this to truly work you need to have an interested population. If only half the citizens are voting, then you have about 1/4 of the population deciding what is best for everybody. What people want can change very quickly, as the majority are following sheep. For example, if you look at US history there is a cyclical pattern of religious revival, where a significantly vocal portion of the population moves towar
Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
But the big question in my eyes is not whatever they make unDRM'd material legal to copy. The interesting thing if is they do as USA (And as Norwegian government tried to do), to make it illegal to circumvent copyright protection measurments. If that's the case, they pretty much ensure it is still illegal to copy media, because most media seems to be DRM'd those days, or at least has potential to be.
So to really make a difference, this has to legalize copying of any media, for non-commercial, private purposes, like listnening to it at your Personal Music Player. If they choose to do, it might stake out a path forward for other nations to follow.
I'm also for a law on media, that discusses your right to the exemplar, or just a general license to use that piece of media as you see fit. I'm for the last option. Let me buy a CD, and thereby rights to MP3s, oggs, and even a new cd for the production-cost of the cd (e.g 1-2$) if I loose the first one. Such a general license would be a nice thing.
The Norwegian government ended up doing it (Score:2)
Re:The Norwegian government ended up doing it (Score:2)
Stupid argument. It should be legal to break DRM, if you're doing legal actions in the first place. Rather, there should be no need for drm, and as such, no need for legal protection. DRM is snake oil. It solves no problem. One won't have to understand a text to duplicate it; you can perfectly well duplicate a chinese newspaper without understanding a word of it. So can you with a
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing I've never understood, is what happens if these are purely software implementations, so that they don't work on non-Windows OSes. I've bought a few CDs that have apparently had DRM stuff on it, but I didn't know that while I was ripping it... but do the anti-circumvention laws consider it illegal if they only made an attempt for 95% of the market,
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
From an Australian legal perspective, you might have a point that if this fair use act was passed after the amended copyright act (which it will be!) it trumps the anticircumvention provisions: If you are engaged in an act of fair use, you might be in the clear.
'Transferbangle'? (Score:5, Interesting)
On a side note google gave only 2 hits for transferbangle, both dupes of this little blurb. So yeah, uh, made up words suck.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
Funny how there's 215,000 hits on google for "cromulent" and 151,000 hits (70.2%) for "perfectly cromulent" - 192,000 (89.3%) if you leave off the quotes.
Can't someone say "pathetically cromulent", "tragically cromulent", "hopelessly cromulent", or "ambiguously cromulent" once in a while?
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:3, Insightful)
OH! (Score:2)
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2, Funny)
Love him or hate him, the man's got a unique way with words. I wonder if his daughters transferbangle?
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2, Informative)
What a crock of shit.
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:4, Funny)
> I'm Australian
Are you now?
And we just have to take your word for it?
> What a crock of shit.
Oh, right.
Sorry to have doubted you, mate.
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
Sure, 2.4% error migh
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
Suggestion:
1 048 576 bytes = 1 megabyte.
1 000 000 bytes = 1 million bytes.
And if you need the floppy-makers' bastardization:
1 024 000 bytes = 1 thousand kilobytes.
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
a megajoule is 1,000,000 joules
a megawatt is 1,000,000 watts
a megahertz is 1,000,000 hertz
but a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes?
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
And joule, watt, and hertz are all SI derived units, but byte isn't SI-related. So it's allowed to steal SI prefixes without stealing their meaning.
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
I thinks that's rather tangential to the discussion. The SI UNITS don't really have much to do with how we name the NUMBER of said units. SI "Mega" is decimal because, well, we count in decimal.
The whole point of the SI prefixes is to make sure there is no ambiguity. Context SHOULD NOT matter. Mega means a million of something. There should be NO possibility of someone saying "Oh, 1 kilobyte per millisecond must be the same thing as one megabyte per second"
Hey
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
Re:'Transferbangle'? (Score:2)
WTF? (Score:4, Funny)
civil disobedience, its whats for dinner.
Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:5, Informative)
The author clearly knows NOTHING about Australia!
In Australia you can't even find Fosters, and, if you can, no one drinks it as it's considered terrible beer.
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:2)
One major exception I can think of is Ireland. Guiness still is the #1 beer in Ireland, and one of the most imported beers in other countries. However I have heard that Budweiser is starting to gain on Guiness for the #1 spot.
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:2)
When I used to drink, whilst guinness was the most offensively heavy beer I could ever imagine drinking, it actually felt like a real, distinctive drink and I would enjoy it for that reason. Fosters is absolutely disgusting and here in the UK not many sane people *enjoy* it.
Still, now I can't stomach any alcohol whatsoever....
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the Fosters ran into business problems when they arrived in Australia and realized that there were no bears to be found anywhere. So they experimented with chilled kangaroo. This was moderately successful, but chilled meat was not really to Australian tastes. So they decided to try brewing beer instead.
Eureka! For some reason they like this stuff. A
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:2, Flamebait)
The author clearly knows NOTHING about the USA!
In the USA you can't even find Budweiser, and, if you can, no one drinks it as it's considered terrible beer.
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:3, Funny)
Pax.
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:2, Informative)
"Good beer" is subjective - there are literally thousands of popular brands on the market... did you know that Australians like beer? - but it's easy to identify the popular beers though it varies from state to state. In NSW and Victoria the most popular beer is Victoria Bitter followed by Carlton Draught. Queensland drinks a lot of Castlemaine XXXX. In Tasmania they drink
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:4, Interesting)
the 'pay to build the bar, then contract to be the exclusive beer supplier' model had been around since before prohibition. it's been proven to be one of the most profitable models, since you no longer to make sure you use quality ingredients in your beers. the cheapest ingredients will do when people have no choice.
Saying fosters is a good beer is equivalent to saying maxwell house makes good coffee. long ago in 1910 when maxwell house was a cafe owned brand and used genuine arabica beans it was an awesome blend... today it's cheap swill, only drinkable if you have no tounge.
better ingredients == better beer & shorter shelf life == fresher better tasting beer == higher production costs, more limited markets etc. you can't mass produce a quality beer for cheap, smaller batch sizes let you dump any that go bad in fermenting, can you imagine a company like fosters or budwiser Dumping a batch of beer because their product testers said it was swill? HAH they don't even test the samples for flavor i'd wager...
some brands of beer keep batch sizes low, and have trained testers who test the batches much like wine tasting, and anything that fails to pass is simply dumped. it's the way a quality beer production facility ought to be run.
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fosters Beer is Laughable in AU (Score:2)
Seems to be working on most Australians.
well, creating a society where (Score:3, Interesting)
Simple (Score:3, Funny)
Re:well, creating a society where (Score:2)
Ruthlessly efficient speed camera technology that is nearly impossible to avoid or dispute. Driving is very pleasant in Victoria now, thanks to speed limit compliance, and the roads feel much safer than they do anywhere else I've been on the planet.
I also believe the first round of "shock and awe" TAC safety advertising was ba
CD Taxes (Score:3, Insightful)
But questions remain. There is a possibility that Australia may follow in Canada's footsteps, and levy a tax on other things to make up for "lost" revenues. For instance, a tax could be levied...CD...
In Canada this sort of backfired on retailers. Hey, when you go over the border next week can you bring back lots of cheap media?
When is a crime a crime? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When is a crime a crime? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:When is a crime a crime? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When is a crime a crime? (Score:2)
VCR Recording? (Score:2, Funny)
Ship the offenders to Madagascar? (Score:2)
Re:Ship the offenders to Madagascar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Transferbungle (Score:3, Funny)
"Shipping to Madagaskar" (Score:4, Interesting)
This detail, and other small (deliberate) errors in style and substance in the article, make me think this article is a huge troll and Zonk (who else?) fell for it.
Re:"Shipping to Madagaskar" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Zonk fell for it. As he has before, and unless someone with a brain removes his editor stauts, he will again.
One has to wonder how he was picked as editor, as he certainly does not represent the community in any way. It was laughable when he was new, but now when the whole slashdot frontpage is full of his 'stories' its just sad. Its not that I disagree with him, that wouldnt be an issue. The problem is that there is ZERO fact checking, and MASSIVE rewording of stories, so much as to make it sound like a completely different thing is going on. And that leads me to the conclusion that this guy is just a paid shill for someone.
Try blocking his stories in your slashdot preferences. You can select which editors do and do not show up on your user page. I cant tell you how much of a difference it makes in the quality of slashdot by just removing that ONE editor
Re:"Shipping to Madagaskar" (Score:3, Funny)
- Gee, Taco, I'm pisching drunk here. Schee thisch sctory here? I'm gonna appraprove it. *hic* Right nowish.
- Slow down, Cowboy, you're too drunk. Go login as Zonk first and no one'll notice.
- Good idea, bosch. I'm on it like... *hic* Whatever. Now, where did that wittle Schubmit button go? Here, button!
Re:"Shipping to Madagaskar" (Score:2)
And in possibly related news... (Score:3, Funny)
Fritz Hollings just suggested to W. that Australia probably has WMDs.
The scary part is (Score:5, Interesting)
FTA: "We should have copyright laws that are more targeted at the real problem," Mr Ruddock said. "We should not treat everyday Australians who want to use technology to enjoy copyright material they have obtained legally as infringers where this does not cause harm to our copyright industries."
I agree that treating everyday users as criminals is bad, but worse is treating 'copyright industries' as something special, something to be protected. This is not the way to encourage competition etc. There are so many different and important issues wrapped up in copyright protection and fair use that no single change will make everything ok. It will take many changes, most notably a change in attitude. When people are willing to get anything they can as cheap as they can find it, people will find a way to sell it to them, whether that is by pirating copies of movies and music or getting Chinese people to make clothes and durable goods at near slavery wages.
Addressing simple issues of theft or fair use is not *THE* answer, entire business practices, including those of protectionist governments, need to be addressed. In the mean time, I'm afriad that the protected will continue to bully their way into even greater protected situations until things come undone completely.
Re:The scary part is (Score:2)
On the contrary, the scary part is that this is something special, and in many western jurisdictions today the above isn't deemed fair use (or whatever that jurisdiction's law calls the concept). In the UK, for example, AIUI it is technically legal to record a broadcast television programme for time-shifting purposes, but illegal to keep the recording lo
Yeah right sure (Score:2)
Why leftist anti-war protestors can claim they are right by linking to their blogs, and so can the Hawkish neo-cons link to their blogs.
Before you know it, people will stop reading news websites and instead get all of their news from blogs and forums. Rumor, innuendo, yellow journalism, and whatever that 12 year-old wanker posts on their own blog is totally more believable than verified facts and e
Re:Yeah right sure (Score:2)
It would be better... (Score:5, Insightful)
That way, they don't tie the wording of the law to any particular technology.
Re:It would be better... (Score:2)
But I can dream...
That wouldn't work, I'm afraid. (Score:2)
It's already bad enough that people don't respect copyrights today... if it were legal, it would be at least an order of magnitude worse.
Re:That wouldn't work, I'm afraid. (Score:2)
It's kind of hard to respect it when the bastards don't even bother TRYING to hide the fact that they're perverting the entire concept of it.
Nothing's going to convince me that the artist's family needs to profit off ANY work for a minumum of four frelling generations (this assuming the artist drops dead immediately after finishing it)
Re:That wouldn't work, I'm afraid. (Score:2)
You'll get no argument from me on the subject of older works that should have
Re:That wouldn't work, I'm afraid. (Score:2)
My point was that complaining about people disrespecting copyright has two sides. I'm not going to condemn the downloaders, because AFAIC, the message is loud and clear: copyright laws are just another form of corporate welfare now. However they were originally intended, it doesn't matter now. As such, they're at morally invalid as far as I am concerned.
Abolish copyright (Score:3, Interesting)
*IAA, wake the fuck up and smell the coffee. As long as you try to usurp copyright for your personal profits, we'll try to abolish it. And you can take that to the bank.
Pirates of the world - Unite!
Power to peer to peer!
the devil is in the detail (Score:2)
VCR recording? (Score:2)
Fair use vs copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Fair use helps the consumer, while copyright helps the producer.
Fair use gives consumer of the product legal ability to use the product in many different ways, which sometimes require making copies of the product for a number of reasons, as long as large portions of the original product are not being distributed illegaly - giving away or selling copies of those copyrighted MP3s, books, movies is illegal if you did not ask the authors permission. When is it fair use? When you are making a backup copy for yourself, when you are transfering data to a different format, so you can listen to it in the car on your stereo, as opposed to your PC. Using portions of the copyrighted works for creating a parody is also fair use. I don't see any moral problems with this type of fair use.
Copyright (normally time limited) protects the rights of the original author. What rights? The rights to a temporary monopoly on the distribution of the product. An argument that by copying you are not depriving the original author of anything is false. You are depriving the original author of the natural monopoly on the distribution by removing appearence of scarcity of the product. The product does not become less useful (noone wants a useless product,) but it makes the product appear WORTHLESS. Which obviously negates the possibility of the author retrieving the investment (s)he put into this useful work. In some cases not being able to retrieve the investment is very dangerous, as it may preclude the author from working on anything else that requires an investment - think multi-million dollar movies, think years and loans spent on writing successful novels/books, think years and money spent on software etc. Thus illegal distribution of copyrighted materials hurts the original authors by removing their ability of making money by removing monopoly on distribution and removing the appearence of scarcity, making the product worthless.
--
Obviously today large corporations are using copyright laws to make large amounts of money on products that by any natural process should already belong in the public domain. For example it can be argued that copyright should not extend to anyone, once the original creator is dead. Lawyers of large corporations can convince the judge otherwise, and this is dangerous, because it sets people's attitudes against all copyrights.
Not everyone can afford spending years working on some highly desirable product and not make any money at the end, because the product becomes worthless in 3 weeks after the release.
My issue with it (Score:4, Interesting)
When the United States Constitution was being drafted, Madison (et al) is on record as being opposed to the idea of having a Bill of Rights (it's my understanding that similar thinking kept a bill of rights out of Australia's federal government), as its existence implies that the Bill contains all the rights retained by the people and the states. He eventually had to backpedal a bit when he himself introduced the Bill of Rights to the first Congress, but even then they're carefully phrased in such away as to remove powers from government rather than giving them to the people ("Congress shall make no law..." instead of, say, Canada's "Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms...") and the Tenth Amendment was included.
My problem with this law is that it implies that VCR recording and CD ripping were illegal to begin with, and it required legislative action in Canberra for the government to grant these rights to the people it's supposed to be subservient to (in practice if not necessarily in legal theory). Basically, this is the Australian federal government telling the people "We can take away your right to do with your property as you please, but we're feeling magnanimous today."
Re:Dupe? (Score:4, Funny)
It's a "repostbangle".
Re:born of criminality? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:born of criminality? (Score:2)
Re:dupe (Score:2)
Re:dupe (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A breath of sanity in the new year (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A breath of sanity in the new year (Score:5, Funny)