[Linux-aus] (Urgent) Digital Agenda Act Review - Online Forum

[Anthony Towns]

Hi guys,

The Digital Agenda act was Australia's equivalent to the DMCA. It was
enacted with a clause requiring it to be reviewed within three years;
that review started in April this year. Last Thursday there was a
public meeting in Sydney for people to make any points they wanted to,
and there was a similar event in Melbourne in August. There's an online
forum *tomorrow* (Tuesday, 9th Sep), and written submissions are due by
the end of the month.

The Digital Agenda stuff is important because it's what adapts Australian
Copyright Law to the Internet and software. It covers things like
circumvention devices (want to play DVDs legally with free software?),
digital rights management, peer to peer file sharing, and all that other
fun stuff. If nothing else, their issues paper includes some interesting
graphs trying to analyse the recent trends in music and video sales and
the effect the Internet may or may not have had on them.

My (initial) impression is the government and the review team are making
a serious attempt at trying to balance the concerns of copyright holders
and users (and aren't do a bad job of it either), but they're not going
to manage it as well as they might if we don't make our concerns known;
the forum tomorrow is one place to do that.

Some details. The review is being conducted by Philips Fox, the law firm.
Their web page is:

http://www.phillipsfox.com/whats_on/Australia/DigitalAgenda/DigitalAgenda.asp

The online forum is at: http://your.phillipsfox.com.au/digitalreview/
Registration is required. It's PHP based, apparently.

The agenda for the online forum is:

    * 10am - Libraries, archives and educational copying
    * 11am - Carriers and carriage service providers
    * 2pm - Technology and rights
    * 3pm - Technological protection measures, circumvention devices and 
            services and rights management information
    * 4pm - Revisit previous topics if necessary

Each item goes for up to an hour.

The review is being conducted under the auspices of the Attorney General's
Dept. Their page on the topic is:

http://www.law.gov.au/www/securitylawhome.nsf/AllDocs/RWP0D4541203B5D600CCA256D280014F02A?OpenDocument

The slashdot story from way back in the day:

  http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/28/0243227&mode=thread&tid=95

Let's not let this one sneak in under our noses, hey?

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

       ``Is this some kind of psych test?
                      Am I getting paid for this?''
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