[LINK] Oz copyright amendment on /.

[Glen Turner]

Bruce Arnold wrote:
> 
> 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.

You write as if these circumvention restrictions are not controversial
in the other jurisdictions.  I suggest that the list of amici submissions
to the DeCSS case in New York shows significant opposition to the application
of those laws.

> In other fora it's praised rather than 'hammered'.

So?  The Australian laws on parallel importation were praised by UK publishers
and their Australian subsidiaries.  Yet the harm to consumers of those clauses
of the Copyright Act was substantial.

I'm not surprised that the publishers of Hollywood content and makers of DVD
drives support clauses in Australian legislation that again restrict Australian
consumers from purchasing in a free market.

> Many journals and newsgroups - not necessarily those in the pay of evil copyright
> czars - simply take it as a given that Australia is bringing its legislation into
> line with Canada, the US, the EU, Central Europe etc.

So?  Am I to be surprised that a lawyer takes longer to see the
consequences of IP legisation than myself, who has been working
at the cuting edge of computing for twenty years and who was part
of the supporting legal team on the Apple Computer case (the first
significant application of the Copyright Act to consumer computing
in Australia)?

In many ways the creators of these laws strike me as exemplars
of the flaws of the Socratic method.  Extended argument about
how the world *should* work, getting further and further removed
from the way the world *does* work, all because they ignore
the evidence of their own eyes.

As it stands today, there is not a single Australian computer
user that has not breached the Copyright Act.  I prefer to
believe that it is the Act, and not all those users, which
is unreasonable and unrealistic in the extreme.

-- 
 Glen Turner                                 Network Engineer
 (08) 8303 3936      Australian Academic and Research Network
 glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au          http://www.aarnet.edu.au/
--
 The revolution will not be televised, it will be digitised