Fair use for Australia (1 Viewer)

[sunny]

http://entertainment.news.com.au/story/0,10221,17673408-10431,00.html

 

[Collin]

I'm glad the Federal Government has finally decided to take action on these issues, although from a crude point of view a skeptic could argue they're doing it simply because they're essentially powerless to enforce those laws (gee, let's arrest all iPod owners!).

I'm not so happy about the prospects of a levy on mp3 players however. The article suggests that the new laws will be quite financially detrimental to music artists even though arguably the legalisation of things such as converting CD to mp3 for personal use has obviously been going on for ages (infact with most people not even knowing it's illegal), so it's not like these laws would really encourage any further illegal wrongdoings.

 

[ogmzergrush]

Hilariously late, but good to see something happening about it.

On the other hand, the article seems to suggest that a lot of it is still up in the air. These changes have been proposed many times previously and have never happened, so I'll be waiting to see something definite before I get too excited.

The transfer of music to mp3 players one interests me. What about music to mp3 cds for use in mp3 cd players? In that case, what about to computers? It'll take quite comprehensive laws to cover all these possibilities reasonably, so it'll be interesting to see where this goes. Personally I expect loopholes and obvious errors in the law of a comedic magnitude, but we shall see.

 

[iamsickofyear12]

These new laws are essentially useless. People have been taping from tv and copying CD's to their mp3 players for a long time, most of them with no idea that it was actually illegal.

 

[ogmzergrush]

I think everyone is aware that the laws have been being broken, as they are currently unreasonable. How is it useless that they intend to *finally* update obviously deficient laws to allow people to continue the same activities without breaking the law? Of course we're not going to see any difference in people's copying behaviour, but it's useful to be legally guaranteed fair use.

Also on this note, I'd be interested to see how this law is applied to music with copy protection mechanisms. Guaranteeing people the right to make legal copies of items, while at the same time disallowing the deliberate avoidance of copy protection mechanisms is obviously contradictory, so I'd be interested to see how this is resolved.

Edit: While they're on a roll I guess it's too much to expect legal backups of purchased software for personal use?