Silly copyright proposal in Australia

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There are some proposed changes in the Australian copyright law that are just too weird.

Australia has its newish free-trade agreement with the US, and so is now harmonising some of its laws. Unfortunately, things are being tightened without the corresponding “fair use” clauses that are part of the equivalent US legislation, and some flawed US stuff like the DMCA is also finding its way into the Australian proposals… laws have a fairly long cycle. The DMCA may get fixed at some point, but a new Australian law will take years again to pick up any such changes.

So, about the new copyright proposals:

The proposed changes include allowing individuals to record a television program but only allowing a single viewing before it must be deleted.
The proposed laws also make it illegal to lend recorded programs to friends or burn a collection (or library) of favourite programs on DVD or CD to keep.

One could possibly debate over the latter, but that “single viewing” thing is just too weird. Sadly, it’s for real though.

So the question for the Australians among you is… do you want to be a passive consumer, or do you rather want to be an active participant in the world? If you don’t actively speak up, things will happen that you may not like.

Live Online Question and Answer Session with Rusty Russell
Friday 16th June at 8:30pm AEST (UTC+1000) there will be a live Question and Answer session with Rusty Russell about the recently launched petition campaign. Rusty will be live via streaming audio and you will be able to ask questions via irc. The session should last about an hour.

Slides: http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/la-online-presentation/
Listen: http://together.linux.org.au:8000/la_talk.ogg
Discuss: #linux-aus on irc.freenode.net