inamerrata

Huh, while the fair use inquiry‘s open for submissions, the National Library of Australia’s crawling my website. Cool. (Hrm, apparently I have Anna to thank for the link.)

Hrm. Evidently I was careless in checking my mail yesterday evening. The Government has commenced a review on options for including new exceptions in the Copyright Act 1968 and released an issues paper, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock announced today. The review will examine whether an exception or specific exceptions to copyright based on principles of “fair […]

Well, it looks like fair use is back on the agenda in Australia.

Via IP Wars, seems there’s been some oral argument in the High Courty on the Sony v Stevens case (ie, is it okay to sell PlayStation modchips, whether you’re using the modchips to play imported games, or pirated games?). Justice McHugh raises some good points. Here’s a notable exchange: McHUGH J: But you seem to […]

That’s the ABC’s claim anyway: The increasing popularity of online music stores is welcome news to a music industry that blames digital piracy for more than two years of precipitous sales declines. “The biggest challenge for the digital music business has always been to make music easier to buy than to steal,” IFPI chairman and […]

Kim’s angry. Meanwhile the cartels have started up their next scam. Here’s the Sunday Mail: Terror by DVD MARTIN WALLACE 19sep04 AUSTRALIA is being flooded with pirate DVDs and the profits from them help fund global terrorism. Here’s the Australian: Illegal DVDs funding global terror By Martin Wallace September 16, 2004 AUSTRALIA is being flooded […]

Rusty (who really needs to setup blosxom and get permalinks) has posted some wrap-up comments on the FTA, which begin: So we lost the FTA battle. […] Personally, I’m strongly convinced that we won the FTA battle; we got everything I was hoping for, at least. It’s amazing the difference a single assumption can make; […]

So, the Labor senators also made some recommendations about temporary copies: Recommendation 15 Labor Senators recommend that the Commonwealth Government implement Recommendations 15 and 16 of the Digital Agenda Review report prepared by Phillips Fox to ensure that temporary reproductions and caching are explicitly protected under Australian law. I briefly mentioned recommendation 15 of the […]

So the FTA Senate Committee’s final report is out now, and there are some more explicit recommendations from the Labor members. Here’s the cliff’s notes. Fair use is in: Recommendation 8 Labor Senators recommend that the Senate Select Committee on Intellectual Property [the establishment of which is Recommendation 6 — aj] investigate options for possible […]

Motion That the Committee recommend that the Senate agree to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement Implementation Bill. For: Senators Cook, Conroy, O’Brien, Brandis, Ferris, Boswell Against: Senators Ridgeway, Harris Summary of Senate inquiry into the FTA Told you so. me, right here, right now Actually, I probably haven’t told you so, gentle reader (and the […]

From the conclusions to the JSCT FTA report: 18.6 The evidence received by the Committee can be divided into three groups: There were those who supported the Agreement and proposed that Australia ratify the AUSFTA; There were those who opposed the Agreement and proposed that Australia not ratify and then there was a third group […]

At least the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties managed to spell my name right, unlike some. From their report on the Au/US FTA: 16.39 The arguments presented to the Committee centred around the balance between users and owners in the Copyright Act 1968, and the change in balance under the obligations in the AUSFTA. One […]

This post is in honour of the Infinite Cat Project. Its lineage is me reading a post by Martin, who read a post by Seth, who read a post by Matthew Skala. Matthew’s post basically attempts to provide a way of thinking about copyright violations, and more particularly about why computer scientists often don’t think […]

(For those playing along at home, this is about the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States, which includes an IP chapter that requires Australia to change its copyright and patent law to line up more with the DMCA and the US Patent Office. I’ve commented on this previously.) Anyway, today’s post […]

The Attorney-General’s department says this about the Digital Agenda report: Current Status of the Government’s Review Phillips Fox conducted their research and analysis independently of the Government. During the term of the consultancy the Government negotiated with the United States a Free Trade Agreement. The Government is now moving towards signing its Free Trade Agreement […]