Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Aussies Brace for DMCA

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Thu Jul 06, 2006 05:49 AM
from the spreading-the-love dept.
Media Politics
Rusty writes "Aussies are counting down to the introduction of the US-FTA-required DMCA legislation, and trying to pressure the government to listen to consumers and innovators, not just industrial copyright holders. Linux Australia has kicked off the campaign with iownmydvds.org and iownmymusic.org."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Aussies Brace for DMCA 50 Comments More | Login /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login
Keybindings Beta
Q W E
A S D
Loading ... Please wait.

  • Hang on a minute... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Brave Guy (457657) on Thursday July 06 2006, @05:55AM (#15665894)

    What "US-FTA-required DMCA legislation"? The Australian AG's office only recently published revised copyright information that seemed to be fixing some of the silliness: time-shifting using VCRs, format-shifting of music, etc.

    • Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by the_unknown_soldier (675161) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:04AM (#15665904)
      When it comes to copyright Australia has some of the worst laws for consumers. The USFTA was what provided the Attorney General with the political capital to establish some sort of "fair use" doctrine. Currently while (according to the high court) you can use things such as mod-chips and reverse engineering (unlike America) you do not own the copyright to anything you buy. So while it is legal to break the CSS encryption on a DVD, it is ILLEGAL to copy content off that DVD whether it has CSS or not.

      Basically: Australia is establishing fair use, and then in the same swoop allowing content holders to take it away through DMCA provisions. The aim of all this is to make the laws as similar as possible to the laws of that great shit heap some like to call the US congress.

      This all of course pails in comparison to what the USFTA is doing to Australian healthcare. You Americans bag Canadians public health system but Australia's is one of the best in the world. Since the Australian government buys all drugs, we are able to get them cheaper. But the big med companies don't like that. The only reason America made this trade agreement was to please the pharmaceutical companies. this copyright/patent stuff is just coming along for the ride
      [ Parent ]

      • Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Tim C (15259)
        you do not own the copyright to anything you buy

        How does that differ from any other country's copyright law? You own the medium and a licence to use the content on it in certain limited ways. Some countries specifically allow you to (eg) media- or format-s

        • Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by the_unknown_soldier (675161) on Thursday July 06 2006, @07:40AM (#15666217)
          Under Australian law you haven't even bought "content". You haven't even bought the right to view content. All you have bought is a peice of plastic. Doing anything to the copyrighted material on it other than listening straight off of the disk (read: mp3's) is illegal. It's semantics, but i take your point.
          [ Parent ]
        • >How does that differ from any other country's copyright law?

          Agreed.

          > You own the medium and a licence to use the content on it in certain limited ways.

          Huh! That on the other hand I don't agree with nor do the copyright law. You own a copy of the wor

      • Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:5, Informative)

        by dbIII (701233) on Thursday July 06 2006, @08:08AM (#15666353)
        The only reason America made this trade agreement was to please the pharmaceutical companies.
        Not quite - it was also supposed to be our bribe for helping out in Iraq - that's right, we did it for the money. It probably serves us right when the trade deal screwed Australia over horribly with downright insulting clauses like not being able to negotiate about trading more beef until 2020, and you can complelely forget about steel, sugar, wheat and everything else the trade minister was interested in. Facing an upcoming election and hit with a "buy now or never get a chance" attitude the trade minister had to agree to anything at all that was offered - hence Australia was screwed over. I'm not sure how many of the weird USA IP laws will actually be enforced - the USA is becoming far less relevant to Australian trade since it is difficult to sell things to the US from here and it makes sense to buy the goods the US would sell from China instead of paying for shipping twice. We'd probably break a few rules - after all we were in it for the money which never arrived, and a government body (eventually privatised) was paying Saddam bribes right up to the time our troops were sitting on the border waiting for the orders to roll in.

        Austalian politics would look weird in the USA - the federal government is made up of coalition of a populist right wing party that calls themselves the "Liberal" party combined with an agrarian socialist party who are far to the left on rural issues and far to the right on city issues. They do not have control of any state - so there has been a power struggle between state and federal government for years and their opponents are funded to a great extent by the trade unions and the Federal government is at this point trying to make the unions irrelevant to starve the opposition with some success. Generally Austalia does actually take a more liberal view than the USA on a lot of issues - due to most of the services and all of the domestic law enforcement being a duty of the states and due to many of the ruling federal party deciding that conservatism means doing nothing. Where the federal government has full responisbility, like immigration, the different ideology shows - with residency visas granted after donations to the party at one end and rapid mistaken deportation of our own citizens to countries at the other, and the officials responsible getting a bonus for each deportation (why check the paperwork when you can personally make more money rushing things through and there is no personal accountability?). There are some things a government should not be allowing the profit motive to interfere with for the good of the state - the for profit immigration detention centres were both a disgrace and a huge drain on the nations revenues. The USA may joke about pound me in the ass prisons, but in Australia male prisioners were raping female prisioners held in the same facility with no way to lock their doors and stop the same thing happening over and over.

        [ Parent ]

        • Free Trade MY ARSE (Score:3, Interesting)

          by sr180 (700526)
          After we signed the free trade agreement, imports from the US went up, and exports TO the US went DOWN.

          We got screwed, royally.

    • Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by GaryPatterson (852699) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:06AM (#15665912)
      Have you seen what those new laws entail?

      After you record a show from TV, you are allowed to watch it exactly once, after which you must *by law* delete it.

      Yes, we finally get some of the Fair Use rights enjoyed by our US friends but it's not yet sane or sensible.
      [ Parent ]

      • It's not ideal, but at least seems an improvement (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Brave Guy (457657) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:13AM (#15665931)

        Yes, I did think that particular example was daft. (I read several of the responses the AG's issues paper [ag.gov.au] and the AG's subsequent comments while preparing a submission of my own for the UK's Gowers review.)

        That said, it's a lot less daft than selling VCRs but saying that all time-shifting is illegal, which seemed to be the case before. It might not be ideal, but at least things are going in the right direction. :-)

        I thought some of the other provisions, such as the format-shifting I mentioned before, sounded a lot more reasonable.

        Do you know what the article here is talking about? Both links were Slashdotted (despite apparently being cache links... go figure) and unless I'm missing something there's nothing mentioned by name to go and look up. What is this new legislation, and how does it fit in with the AG's issues paper and the review of the ACA?

        [ Parent ]

    • Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alsee (515537) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:27AM (#15665961) Homepage
      What "US-FTA-required DMCA legislation"?

      THIS Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement [dfat.gov.au] Article 17.4 section 7 details virtually the exact text of the US DMCA anti-circumvention law and section 8 details virtually the exact text of the US DMCA rights management information law, and reqires the Australian government to pass virtually that exact DMCA text into AU law.

      7. (a) In order to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms use in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorised acts in respect of their works, performances, and phonograms, each Party shall provide that any person who:

      (i) knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know, circumvents without authority any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram, or other subject matter; or

      (ii) manufactures, imports, distributes, offers to the public, provides, or otherwise traffics in devices, products, or components, or offers to the public, or provides services that:

      (A) are promoted, advertised, or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of any effective technological measure;

      (B) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any effective technological measure; or

      (C) are primarily designed, produced, or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of any effective technological measure,

      shall be liable and subject to the remedies specified in Article 17.11.13. Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied where any person is found to have engaged wilfully and for the purposes of commercial advantage or financial gain in any of the above activities. Each Party may provide that such criminal procedures and penalties do not apply to a non-profit library, archive, educational institution, or public non-commercial broadcasting entity.

      (b) Effective technological measure means any technology, device, or component that, in the normal course of its operation, controls access to a protected work, performance, phonogram, or other protected subject matter, or protects any copyright.

      (c) In implementing sub-paragraph (a), neither Party shall be obligated to require that the design of, or the design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as the product does not otherwise violate any measures implementing sub-paragraph (a).

      (d) Each Party shall provide that a violation of a measure implementing this paragraph is a separate civil or criminal offence and independent of any infringement that might occur under the Party's copyright law.

      (e) Each Party shall confine exceptions to any measures implementing sub-paragraph (a) to the following activities, which shall be applied to relevant measures in accordance with sub-paragraph (f):

      (i) non-infringing reverse engineering activities with regard to a lawfully obtained copy of a computer program, carried out in good faith with respect to particular elements of that computer program that have not been readily available to the person engaged in those activities, for the sole purpose of achieving interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs;

      (ii) non-infringing good faith activities, carried out by an appropriately qualified researcher who has lawfully obtained a copy, unfixed performance, or display of a work, performance, or phonogram and who has made a good faith effort to obtain authorisation for such activities, to the extent necessary for the sole purpose of identifying and analysing flaws and vulnerabilities of technologies for scrambling and descrambling of information;
      [ Parent ]
      • (i) knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know, circumvents without authority any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram, or other subject matter;

        If it's a measure designed to control acc
        • Effective means that is requires special expertiese and/or tools to circumvent. Entering service codes into a dvd-player to make it region-free or using a marker pen to circumvent cd copy-protection does not count. Installing a specially designed mod-chip
        • Keep reading. (b) redefines "effective" as "in the normal course of its operation" which basically means "so long as no one does anything we didn't specifically intent for them to do".

          -

      • Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        On the subject of technological prevention measures, I think this Italian Judge [repubblica.it] had the right approach. He turned down the request that H3G customers removing SIM card locks (and businesses offering unlocking services) be prosecuted for criminal offences s

  • I started a new campaign (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tribbin (565963) on Thursday July 06 2006, @05:57AM (#15665897) Homepage
    See more info at:

    iownyourdvds.org

    • Wrong address. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ihlosi (895663) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:05AM (#15665908)
      The address is unreachable.



      Maybe you meant www.weownyourdvds.com ?

      [ Parent ]

      • Re:Wrong address. (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        No, it was a lame attempt at a joke on the parent poster's part. He said that HE started a campaign. But the site he mentioned, like many instances in his life, has DNS problems because he just just couldn't get it up.
  • Call me a cynic, but i've seen unequivocal evidence from the EU member nations that these elitists don't give a damn about what their own peoples have to say.

    *shameless plug* check my sig for details. */shameless plug*

    • Australia is not an EU member nation. It's not even in Europe, it's on a completely different continent on the other side of the world. Perhaps you are thinking of Austria?

        • >they caved to us based lobbyists and adopted the DMCA..

          Not completely true. The EU directive doesn't have clauses about "access" to a work. The ponly protection included is those that control rights the copyright holder has. Acces is NOT such a one. Th
            • >so they protect "rights" controls?

              Yes, circumvention of protection of actions that the copyright holder has exclusive rights on. Or if you want to look at it in some other way. Protection of something that would otherwise have been an infringement and
              • Yes, circumvention of protection of actions that the copyright holder has exclusive rights on. Or if you want to look at it in some other way. Protection of something that would otherwise have been an infringement and nothing else.

                DRM is not designed this
                • >DRM is not designed this way.. it is designed with the default
                  >as "deny".

                  I have not discussed how DRM works or even discussed it at all. I was talking about the EU driective and the US DMCA and their differences. How DRM works is quite irellevant to

  • FTA Is A Joke (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GaryPatterson (852699) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:13AM (#15665930)
    The ruling elite here in Australia, the increasingly ironically named Liberal Party, solid the FTA on the basis of free and equal trade between Australia and the US. Because, you know, we have an equal seating at the bargaining table. Australia and the largest economy on the planet. Equal.

    Yeah, that works.

    After about a year we find that US imports have nearly tripled, while Australian exports to the US have dropped.

    Amazing surprise to some of us who spoke out at the time but were silenced by the scream of 'free money' from the US that so many thought they'd see.

    The FTA also included a number of hilarious provisions like "you can export beef to the US in 18 years, unless they veto it in the meantime" and "bend over for our DMCA."

    So now we welcome our US overlords, and hope that they don't brutalise our nation too badly when we become a new vassal province (or dare we hope - a state!). The national anthem never really caught on anyway. It has the word "girt" in it, which was too much for most Aussies.

    Go DMCA! It's a bloody bonza idea, you beauty! (just practicing for the re-education camps)

    • Re:FTA Is A Joke (Score:3, Funny)

      by theadman (979403)
      John Howard it so firmly in the pocket of George W. that Mr. Bush's phone gets scratched on the Aussie leaders glasses...

      • Re:FTA Is A Joke (Score:3, Funny)

        by kubrick (27291)
        I always preferred "John Howard is so far up George W. Bush's arse that he can see the bottom of Tony Blair's feet."

    • Re:FTA Is A Joke (Score:5, Informative)

      by G-funk (22712) <josh@gfunk007.com> on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:33AM (#15665971) Homepage Journal
      The FTA had nothing to do with import and export levels, that was peripheral. It was about selling us BS "intellectual property" in return for limiting the US farming subsidies so our economy that's still based so heavily in primary induustry doesn't fall over.
      [ Parent ]
      • It's always like that, see the FTA proposed in latin america and other countries. Pseudo-economists get their pants wet saying "oh we will be able to sell our agro products to the US!" but we've already been there. Barriers still remain, nothing gets expor
        • If this [cia.gov] is true, then my bad. Why the fuck do we take so much shit in the various trade agreements over the years? I always thought mining was a distant second to farming. Lousy media.

          Lousy national party and their farm propaganda.
    • No need for a re-education camp. It's all much simpler: you make a "mistake", they take your money. Repeat until you've learned your lesson.

    • Re:FTA Is A Joke (Score:3, Interesting)

      by graffix_jones (444726)

      After about a year we find that US imports have nearly tripled, while Australian exports to the US have dropped.

      Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics can tell you that this has more to do with the weakening of the US Dollar versus some sor

  • Hurray! (Score:2)

    by crhylove (205956)
    Or as Bad Religion put it:

    "we've got spite and dedication as a vehement brew
    the world hates us, well we hate them too
    but you're exempted of course if you
    come join us

    independent, self-contented, revolutionary
    intellectual, brave, strong and scholarly
    if you'r

  • Yet another DMCA-like (Score:4, Informative)

    by Submarine (12319) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:21AM (#15665948) Homepage
    After the DMCA in the USA...
    After the 2001 EUCD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Copyright_Directi ve) in the EU...
    After the 2006 DADVSI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DADVSI) in France...

  • Ah, the beautiful FTA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MavEtJu (241979) <edwin AT mavetju DOT org> on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:24AM (#15665953) Homepage
    I love it when John Howard goes over to the USA for a visit and comes back...

    ... One time he came back with the idea of an Free Trade Agreement

    ... And the next time he came back with the idea that nuclear weapons were safe and that same-sex marriages were dangerous.

    I don't know what they feed him there in Washington, but it surely isn't healthy.

    • Re:Ah, the beautiful FTA (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > I don't know what they feed him there in Washington, but it surely isn't healthy.

      Money most likely.
    • > I don't know what they feed him there in Washington,
      > but it surely isn't healthy.

      I don't know, I think George W.'s sperm is probably full of protein and other good things.

  • Decide Now Media Moguls - Which Way ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by craznar (710808) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:33AM (#15665973) Homepage
    Ok ... I'm happy for the record companies to have a choice, either:

    A: I buy a DVD, and I own it ... I can copy it, put it on my hard drive and if I lose it I have to buy a new one.
    B: I buy the rights to play the DVD... I can't copy it, however if I lose it I can walk into a store and take another one free.

    Seems reasonable to me...

    Wait ... there is one flaw in my plan, just one word. I'm sure you can guess which one it is.

    If I ever get nabbed for some stupid DMCA law, I'm going to very publicly sell my several thousand dollars of purchased DVDs to pay for some of my defence.

    I think that will make the point...

    • Re:Decide Now Media Moguls - Which Way ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KiloByte (825081) on Thursday July 06 2006, @06:53AM (#15666022)
      Ok ... I'm happy for the record companies to have a choice, either:

      A: I buy a DVD, and I own it ... I can copy it, put it on my hard drive and if I lose it I have to buy a new one.
      B: I buy the rights to play the DVD... I can't copy it, however if I lose it I can walk into a store and take another one free.

      [...]
      If I ever get nabbed for some stupid DMCA law, I'm going to very publicly sell my several thousand dollars of purchased DVDs to pay for some of my defence.
      You assume that you have any rights to whatever you bought/licensed. The whole point of DMCA-like laws is to deny you these very rights. Including the right to resell your purchased DVDs. Just wait for the (mandatory) DRM.
      [ Parent ]
  • But, then again, there's no such thing as a "free trade" agreement with the US. It's a "you'll buy our products and we'll fuck your producers and exporters" agreement.
    When the agreement is fully in effect, which will be sometime around 2017 IMMIC, its gr

  • Treaties trump Democracy? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bmh129 (928163)

    It looks like the politicians have figured out one more way to take away rights--use treaties. All they need is one other country to agree with them, and suddenly, unpopular legislation must be passed to comply with the treaty. And then, when "those pesk

    • Actually you're dead right. It was started under Hawke/Keating Labour, but was bought to a new level by Howard the Coward.

      AFAIR, treaties don't even have to be approved by parliament. (Some one correct me if I'm wrong). The enabling legislation is then a s
  • Both of the links on the story are dead. Either they are incorrect, or slashdotted.

    • Re:FTA? (Score:2)

      by bakes (87194)
      It's Free Trade Agreement.

      Perhaps you are more familiar with "RTFA"?
    • Several of the provinces in Canada have banned smoking in pubs and nightclubs. It hasn't been an issue here. There is always an initial drop, but it comes back when people realize there isn't anywhere else to go to smoke, so they just suck it up and go out
Check for more

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.