[LINK] Digital Agenda Review

[Tim Lister]

I attended this curious event in Sydney yesterday, and my impressions were:

- the Terms of Reference were very carefully crafted to avoid anything 
except a purely technical discussion on the drafting of the Gov't's "2001 
Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act", with no discussion allowed 
outside the terms; although the presenters, PhillipsFox, seemed regretful 
of the limitations, and only reluctantly slapped down comments that strayed.

- the discussion of "Libraries, archives and educational copying" was 
really about Fair Dealing, but was restricted to Library usage, which 
although very important, is hardly the whole story.

- "Liability of carriers and carriage service providers" seemed to be only 
concerned about whether cached pages should be considered infringing copies 
of Library data, and i was shot down in flames for trying to raise 
Accessibility issues. (yes, this seriously pissed me off).

- Would you believe that during the session on "Circumvention devices and 
services, technological protection measures and rights management 
information" the phrase "DMCA" was never spoken once?  Satan give me strength!

- You might think that in a session called "Rights and technology issues" 
that some interesting matters might be raised.  Don't believe it.  It was 
just a lot of rabbiting on about embedding Information Rights Management 
data into files.

- One rebel, the chap who built the modchip that Sony got exercised about, 
had a good time denigrating the illogicality of the legal system, that made 
it illegal to modify legal hardware that he legally owned to play legal 
datafiles that he legally owned, but that was the high spot of the day.  I 
talked to him afterwards, and he has a lot of support, but unfortunately 
nearly all of it from people with no money; and it will cost him $38,000 
just to file his appeal.

- The presenters seemed puzzled that nobody wanted to talk about, much less 
make impassioned speeches on, the rights of programmers to decompile 
programs, and asked if there was a programmer in the house (is this the 
wave of the future? instead of "Is there a Doctor in the house", one asks 
"Is there a Programmer in the house" - well, it might save more lives 
:).  I felt sorry for them and patiently explained that the programming 
profession has changed from the old cowboy days; now one has only 3 
alternatives - work for a Proprietary Corporation, whence the sourcecode 
and tools are available anyway; work with Open Source; or starve.  Yeah, i 
know that's a gross oversimplification, but at least it got something on 
their recording (the entire proceedings were recorded)

- you can see the papers we were working off at 
http://www.phillipsfox.com/whats_on/Australia/DigitalAgenda/DigitalAgenda.asp#ScrollOver8 

but you'll need M$ IE 6 to see this page, Mozilla won't do it.  (I haven't 
tested other browsers, it's a dumbo browser-sniffing VB script at fault here)

- note that Submissions close 30th of September, i believe that a number of 
groups are working on submissions, including EFA and the Greens (that one i 
_can_ guarantee!).

still slightly steamed,

Tim Lister
South Sydney Greens
web: http://ssg.nsw.greens.org.au
email: <mailto:webmaster at ssg.nsw.greens.org.au>webmaster at ssg.nsw.greens.org.au  
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