[LINK] Fwd: Review of Format-Shifting Exceptions

[Glen Turner]

Hi Laura,

Tony Barry forwarded you mail to the Link mailing list.

> - Technological protection measures (TPMs)
> The Copyright Act 1968 makes it an offence to break technological  
> protections measures, or digital locks. Therefore, if a user owns a  
> photograph or video containing some kind of copy-protection on it,  
> they will be unable to utilise the format shifting provisions,  
> since it would be illegal for them to override or break copy- 
> protection. So if a consumer purchases photographs in digital  
> format, but the photographs are locked up to prevent them from  
> being printed out, the consumer is unable to format shift them.

It would be useful if the Copyright Act was altered to redefine
TPM as "commercially available" protection measures. Then as
vendors go out of business and equipment becomes so old as to
be a pain to use the customer can format-shift their now-useless
data. Imagine the loss to citizens' assets of AAC music if
Apple went broke.

It should also be permitted to breach a TPM where the vendor has
implemented region coding for the purposes of market differentiation.
That is, to copy a Region 1 CSS-protected DVD to a region-free DVD
for playing on my Region 5 DVD player.

-- 
Glen Turner <http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/>
0416 295 857 or +61 416 295 857