[LINK] Oz copyright amendment on /.

[Damien Miller]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2001, Bruce Arnold wrote:

> In recent posts to LINK Nick Smith at the ADA's highlighted public
> interest concerns about circumvention restrictions but the Slashdot
> item you've pointed to (and the underlying article in Australian IT)
> seems unexceptional. Specifically "... On monday morning it will be
> illegal to modify playstations in Australia to play pirated games. "
>
> Australia's not unique. Irrespective of views about the moral basis
> or social consequences of copyright, piracy *is* illegal in Canada,
> the US and the EU. There *are* restrictions in other jurisdictions
> on circumvention.

These modification are also necessary to be able to use games from a
different region (Playstation games have had the equivalent of DVD
region coding for years).

You can bet that the vendors of modification chips will be re-launching
their products as "region-free modifications" in due course. Depending
on the outcome of the ACCC's enquiry into DVD region coding, they may
actually have a leg to stand on.

-d

-- 
| Damien Miller <djm@mindrot.org> \ ``E-mail attachments are the poor man's
| http://www.mindrot.org          /   distributed filesystem'' - Dan Geer