The Australian federal government is set to legalise MP3 ripping. In Australia, ripping MP3s from CDs, taping TV programmes and doing other such things without the rightsholder's permission is a criminal offense, and has been since Australia adopted US copyright law without those pesky fair-use provisions that so get in the way of the copyright industry. Now the Attorney-General (in between making sedition and detention-without-trial laws, undoubtedly) intends to bring in some fair-use provisions for "everyday forms of private copying that do not harm copyright owners". Hopefully the provisions will be drafted reasonably broadly and won't have any nasties like DRM mandates or anything.

Posted by: AndrewB | http:// | Fri Dec 30 00:13:50 2005

Pretty sure the law was like that before the US fair trade agreement. The fair trade agreement just made it worse in a bunch of other ways (public domain etc.)

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/ | Fri Dec 30 23:40:18 2005

IIRC, before the FTA, ripping MP3s was not a criminal offense; i.e., the record companies could go after you in a civil court if they could show that you caused them damages, but the onus was on them.

Posted by: Brere Rabbit | http://www.godhatesamerica.com | Sun Jan 1 02:16:50 2006

You talking to yourself again Andrew?

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