[LINK] FC: Recording industry wants to scan .au university computers (fwd)

[Glen Turner]

Timothy Michael O'Leary wrote:
> Universities exist all over the world, they don't like to break the law 
> or even be contentious with opinions (despite academic freedom rhetoric) 
> and they have shiploads of yoofs to reach easily.

The unis, crying poor in every Wednesday's "Australian", are going
to put in a funding proposal to DEST to give millions of dollars
to the recording industry?  Or maybe they'll cut staff and courses
to fund the payment?

As someone else mentioned, I think the recording industry
is trying to leverage their US experience into Australia.
I'm not sure how relevant the US experience is:

  - Australian unis don't have significant proportions
    of their students in dorm accoomodation.

  - Australian unis pay for Internet by the byte, so they're
    not going to allow huge amounts of MP3 traffic.

> A cheap way to generate publicity and put pressure on governments to 
> bring in a blank CD tax.

Has anyone seen the fine print for this proposal.  I went
looking for it but couldn't find anything more than
media releases.

It's not the CD tax which worries me, but that such as tax
would be a precedent for a hard disk tax and a flash memory
tax as music players move away from CD formats.  If they
want $1 per storage for 20 songs, then buying a hard disk
in the future will be very expensive (about $500 for the
largest hard disk now).

-- 
  Glen Turner                (08) 8303 3936 or +61 8 8303 3936
  Australian Academic and Research Network   www.aarnet.edu.au