On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 07:30:58PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: > But a terrible thing has happened, that may prove to be an awesome > opportunity for LA (and possibly ACS, depending on their politics) to make > some angry yet positive noise about Australia selling out our potential to > the US. > http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/negotiations/us_fta/outcomes/08_intellectual_property.html > Seriously scary stuff, that we *need* to address. There's no details there to address, though. What there is is: a) Agreement to implement the WIPO Internet Treaties by entry into force of the Free Trade Agreement b) An expeditious process that allows for copyright owners to engage with Internet Service Providers and subscribers to deal with allegedly infringing copyright material on the Internet. c) Tighter controls on circumventing technological protection of copyright material together with a mechanism for examining and as necessary introducing public interest exceptions in relation to technological protection measures, d) An increased term of protection for copyright material e) increased criminal and civil protection against the unlawful decoding of encrypted program carrying satellite TV signals I don't know what (a)'s about. Could be important, could be trivial. (b)'s disappointing, but I don't think it affects Linux or Open Source at all. (c)'s disappointing at first glance, although the "public interest exception" could be interesting. It's definitely disappointing that the Digital Agenda review seems to have been made completely irrelevant. But mostly that's disappointing in that we lose the chance to make improvements, not because it makes anythign worse. (d)'s disappointing, but is negligibly different to just retaining the current term, which is effectively infinite anyway. (e) seems a bit gratuitous, but doesn't seem particularly important either. Lots of that's disappointing, but none of it seems particularly scary -- we should be able to go on just as we are now afaics. The "public interest exceptions" to TPMs might even have some potential. It'd be nice for LA to have some involvement in the drafting of those... Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we could. http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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