Today (July 10th) is International Fair Use Day, and although we don’t have any legal concept of ‘Fair use’ in Australia, it really highlights that we are taking on all the issues of the US DMCA (in our US/AU FTA) without the partial balancing effect that fair use gives consumers in the US. i.e. – all the issues and none of the protections 🙁
Check out this very amusing cartoon that shows the ridiculousness of some of the arguments we are hearing about increasing digital protections, and reducing consumer rights.
That’s what file sharing is like: Taking a kitty away from a kitty…
Australia does have extensive provisions for fair use (called ‘fair dealing’ in our Act), it’s just that they don’t include making complete copies of copyright works for personal use as in the US.
See Division III (Acts not constituting infringements of copyright in works) of the cOPYRIGHT aCT 1968.
D’oh, sorry about the caps lock shocker.