Fighting an Australian DMCA [LWN.net]

The free trade agreement recently signed between the U.S. and Australia requires the latter to adopt a U.S. style anti-circumvention law. That is bad enough, but the media industry is trying to get that turned into a full DMCA-style law. Linux Australia is now running a campaign to push for something more reasonable; there is a petition for Australians to print, circulate, and send in. "We ask the Parliament in the revision of these laws to clearly tie circumvention offenses to things which assist piracy, not activities such as playing our own DVDs or games without explicit permission! We ask the Parliament to commit to market freedom and competition in Australia, and refuse to provide new legal weaponry against competitive and innovative technology companies and users, such as Free and Open Source software."

Rusty Russell will be doing a live question and answer session on this issue the night of Friday, June 16 (Australian time); see the Linux Australia page for details.

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Fighting an Australian DMCA

Posted Jun 14, 2006 15:34 UTC (Wed) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Anybody who puts anti-circumvention texts into laws should remember what
Copyright actually is for: To protect the weak, the easy to copy things.
There's no need to protect the strong, the difficult to copy things, so
everybody who signs up to a free market principle should trust the
strength of the strong, and don't come to aid them.

The ultimate consequence would be to not apply copyright (apart from
person rights such as authorship and the right to first publishing) to
copy-protected work, and I think that's entirely fair. After all, copy
protection means that the supplier doesn't trust the copyright law, so he
helps himself. Let the users help themselves, as well, then.