Fri, 25 Jun 2004
I’m inclined to think that I’ve worn out the “newly conservative” explanation for blogging under the “neo-con” tag, but I haven’t come upon a replacement yet, and I can’t resist commenting on this. The Senate Select Committee on the Free Trade Agreement has an interesting membership. It’s designed, depending on your level of cynicism, either to more accurately represent the membership in the senate, or to give the Labor MPs an excuse for doing what they want, independent of what the JSCT committee says (which is whatever the government says, as it has a simple majority from the coalition parties).
There are thus two Liberal senators, a National senator (ie, three government senators), three Labor senators, a Democrat senator, and… a One Nation senator.
From the conclusions to the JSCT FTA report:
18.6 The evidence received by the Committee can be divided into three groups: There were those who supported the Agreement and proposed that Australia ratify the AUSFTA; There were those who opposed the Agreement and proposed that Australia not ratify and then there was a third group who highlighted potential problems with particular Chapters without expressing an opinion on whether Australia should ratify.
18.7 Having determined that ratification is in Australia’s national interest, the approach the Committee has taken to address the concerns of this third group has been to make a number of recommendations which it believes are consistent with the spirit and text of the Agreement.
In other news, the two page “Dissenting Report” (which seconds all the recommendations of the main report except actual ratification, which it considers to still be premature) was only signed by the Labor party committee members; Senator Bartlett doesn’t seem to have taken the opportunity to explain or even note the Australian Democrats’ opposition. Odd.
On the upside: bipartisan political support for fair use and opposition to region coding!
Thu, 24 Jun 2004
At least the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties managed to spell my name right, unlike some. From their report on the Au/US FTA:
16.39 The arguments presented to the Committee centred around the balance between users and owners in the Copyright Act 1968, and the change in balance under the obligations in the AUSFTA. One submission noted
The primary balance provided by the United States to its citizens against strong IP rights is a broad exemption for ‘fair use’ of works…It has the benefit of coping far more flexibly with new technologies…42
So Australians will hopefully soon get the right to legally tape shows for later viewing and to make mp3s of CDs they’ve bought. Who says bad treaties can’t be useful?
They also make a recommendation that at least partially defangs the anti-circumvention provisions; though it’s not entirely clear to what extent. As always, Kim Weatherall has more. There’s also an interim report from the Senate committee – which is really two reports one on why the FTA sucks, and another from the government senators rebutting that, and the initial round of implementing legislation (which has lots of IP stuff, but not the really interesting IP stuff).
The JSCT report notes that as far as IP is concerned, the agreement was drafted the way it has been “to ensure consistency with the US template approach to its free trade agreements.” So heads up to anyone who wants to avoid the DMCA and has a government that might consider negotiating with the US over better trade deals; you’re going to be going through the exact same stuff pretty soon. (Open source trade negotiations: don’t start from scratch, instead take our successes and build on them, and take our failures and fix them)
Thanks to Greg Black for prompting me to check up on what’s been happening on all this.
I haven’t been blogging much lately; and for some reason I feel obliged to note that for a change that this is neither a forthright demonstration of languid apathy, nor even an expected consequence of a surfeit of other things to do. Oh well, what we can’t manage in frequency or regularity, will presumably be made up for in quantity sooner or later.
This post is in honour of the Infinite Cat Project. Its lineage is me reading a post by Martin, who read a post by Seth, who read a post by Matthew Skala.
Matthew’s post basically attempts to provide a way of thinking about copyright violations, and more particularly about why computer scientists often don’t think much of copyright. He basically postulates that there’s an invisible “colour” associated with bits, and that where computer scientists get into trouble is trying to ignore that colour.