DMCA for Australians! god, no!

[Mug Funky]

okay, i've not heard ANYTHING in the australian media about this, and i'm a little disappointed about it.

there's been a lot of talk (none good except from the encumbent government, which hopefully we'll vote out in a few months, but doom9 isn't for that) about the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

very recently the text of this agreement was released for legal review. it's all very preliminary. you can view it here:

http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/negotiations/us_fta/text/

of particular note is "article 17 - intellectual property rights", available for download above.

i snipped this out of it just now (it's a bit lengthy)...

===========

17.8

7. (a) In order to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms, use in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorized acts in respect of their works, performances, and phonograms, each Party shall provide that any person who:

(i) knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know, circumvents without authority any
effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance or phonogram, or other subject matter; or

(ii) manufactures, imports, distributes, offers to the public, provides, or otherwise traffics
in devices, products, or components, or offers to the public, or provides services, which:

(A) are promoted, advertised, or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of any effective technological measure, or
(B) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any effective technological measure, or
(C) are primarily designed, produced, or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of any effective technological measure;

shall be liable and subject to the remedies provided for in Article 17.11.13. Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied where any person, is found to have engaged wilfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or financial gain in the above activities. Each Party may provide that such criminal procedures and penalties do not apply to a nonprofit library, archive, educational institution, or public noncommercial broadcasting entity.

(b) Effective technological measure means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, controls access to a protected work, performance, phonogram, or other subject matter, or protects any copyright.

(c) In implementing subparagraph 7(a), neither Party is obligated to require that the design of, or the design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or
computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such product does not otherwise violate any provisions implementing subparagraph 7(a).

(d) Each Party shall provide that a violation of provisions implementing the provisions of this paragraph is a separate civil or criminal offence and independent of any infringement that might occur under the Party’s law on copyright.

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and here's the civil measures referred to:


=========

17.11

13. (a) Each Party shall provide for civil remedies against the acts described in Article 17.4.7 and 17.4.8. Available civil remedies shall include at least:

(i) provisional measures, including the seizure of devices and products suspected of being involved in the proscribed activity;

(ii) damages of the type available for infringement of copyright;

(iii) payment to the prevailing party of court costs and fees and reasonable attorney's fees (17-26); and

(iv) destruction of devices and products found to be involved in the proscribed activity.

(b) A Party may provide that damages shall not be available against a nonprofit library, archive, education institution, or public non-commercial broadcasting entity that sustains the burden of proving such entity was not aware or had no reason to believe that its acts constituted a proscribed activity.

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to be honest i'm not surprised at all. but the aussies on this board (and everywhere else... i'm going to email links to this thread to friends) should definitely make some kind of stink about this to your local member, both state and federal (state will listen more... we have the unique situation that ALL states have the opposing government to the federal one. it's really quite funny).

[dragongodz]

thats disgusting(not surprising) to say the least. i knew little johnny had screwed the sugar growers but it seems the rest of us have been bent over aswell.

"circumvention of any effective technological measure"
how are they effective if they are easily circumvented ?

"Effective technological measure means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, controls access to a protected work, performance, phonogram, or other subject matter, or protects any copyright."
well then that protection using autoload for cds in pcs would be covered in the strictest sense. that is normal operation of the cd would be to autoload the protection to prevent copying and by holding the shift key or disabling autoload you would be circumventing its normal operation.

you know i thought Alston was bad(ok he was) but this puts all the stupid things he did to shame. thats totally F.U.B.A.R.

so come on the rest of you Aussies write to your local and federal pollies and tell them how stupid this is. ok 99% of them will probably ignore the letters but its a start, write to newspapers etc next.

[Mug Funky]

yeah! tell me about it. it's disgusting the way Howard and the rest have pulled on the skirt for the Bush II administration.

no spine at all. and it's shocking that there's been nothing on this in the media. (at least that i've seen). it's been snuck past the australians. the FTA has been pretty underhand from the beginning to be honest. just a formal statement of US hegemony that we can sign and accept. (okay, that last bit could be beyond the scope of this forum...)

bear in mind that this is a draft. it can still be changed (hopefully... a doubt we can do anything about article 17).

[Mug Funky]

*bump*

thanks to doom9 for putting this on the news page

it appears that ALL the US FTA's have this clause in them. a quick google of "FTA DMCA" says that this is not new news at all, and that there are a load of countries affected by this.

hmm. maybe i'll go live in new zealand. much friendlier there.

[Stux]

Hmmm,

I wonder if this means we won't be able to buy multi-region DVD players anymore :-\

[Mug Funky]

not sure... i think the ACCC declared them perfectly legal (as are ps2 mod chips)

it hopefully falls outside "effective technological measures", as regions are completely useless and extremely anti-consumer.

[dragongodz]

hmm whether its legal now or if that gets passed are 2 different things. that is if a movie studio(or the dvd producer) claimed that region coding is a type of protection then that COULD make region free dvd players illegal to sell, or at least result in a court case or threat there of. already sold units should not be a problem unless they made the law retroactive and tried to demand a recall of such units, i dont think even they would be that stupid.

what it can come down to is whats considered "effective". as courts in general have very little tech savvy that could be a problem....for us.
the thing is the way its worded could mean anything that has any type of protection MAY be suceptible to challenge.

[Mug Funky]

Each Party shall provide that a violation of provisions implementing the provisions of this paragraph is a separate civil or criminal offence and independent of any infringement that might occur under the Party’s law on copyright.

that says to me that it overrides any current laws, but i'm sure the ACCC would disagree. they've proven ballsy in the past, lets hope they can stand up to Georgie boy.

interestingly enough, what about the situation pointed out by my friend at madman - under this new provision he'd be breaking the law each and every day in the normal line of work.

DVD authoring for one particular region usually means ripping DVDs from other regions. of course, they could specifically ask for digibeta masters, but usually they just get sent the commercial R1 or R2 DVD. they have permission from the copyright holders to do this, but if DeCSS is declared illegal (DVDdecrypter) they will still be breaking the law in spite of having permission...

[GIR]

they could specifically ask for digibeta masters

Which is what they should be doing, not because ripping DVD's is wrong but from a technical standpoint, I have the R1 & R4 copies of Walkabout and you can tell from the picture quality that they just recompressed the R1 copy (that or they captured it from video tape), this makes no sense considering R1 is NTSC 720x480 & R4 is PAL 720x576, really for a commercial product they should have made a proper 720x576 picture, be it from digibeta master or film as the R1 was I don’t care! not only is Walkabout 10 times worse than the R1 copy it is possibly the worse DVD in my whole collection. </end rant>

[Mug Funky]

heh. beggars can't be choosers unfortunately.

not to make cultural assertions here, but a lot of NTSC land people are simply too arrogant to consider even transferring their film to PAL.

obviously any authoring house worth it's salt is going to ask for the best masters available. it's just a shame that usually the best available to them (considering release dates...) is a DVD.

[Matthew]

Well the NTSC->PAL conversions would only be for 'niche' titles pretty much, which is what madman specialises in, from memory.

Anyway, the concept of it being legal to back up a DVD you own provided you don't break the copy protection in the process smells putrid. It's appalling that US politicians could champion such blatently nonsensical principles simply to satisfy sectional interests.

Precisely for such reasons I'm optimistic that this kind of legislation can never seriously survive in practice over the long-term. Especially since plenty of average joes copy audio CDs etc and the idea of serious enforcement measures against (or monitoring, DRM, etc) them would really piss 'em off - and be reflected at the ballot box.

[Mug Funky]

hmm. my faith in the ballot box is waning slightly.

there's always civil disobedience, but it hasn't come to that yet (i'd hesitate to follow in Gandhi's footsteps with such a piddling cause as protesting DRM measures)

[Matthew]

Well it wouldn't be about DRM measures per se, but in large part the privacy issues associated with their effective enforcement. In the same way that suggestions like identity cards really get people stirred up.