Tue, 10 Aug 2004
Rusty (who really needs to setup blosxom and get permalinks) has posted some wrap-up comments on the FTA, which begin:
So we lost the FTA battle. […]
Personally, I’m strongly convinced that we won the FTA battle; we got everything I was hoping for, at least. It’s amazing the difference a single assumption can make; in this case the assumption being “is the FTA defeatable?”
Thu, 05 Aug 2004
So, the Labor senators also made some recommendations about temporary copies:
Recommendation 15
Labor Senators recommend that the Commonwealth Government implement Recommendations 15 and 16 of the Digital Agenda Review report prepared by Phillips Fox to ensure that temporary reproductions and caching are explicitly protected under Australian law.
I briefly mentioned recommendation 15 of the DAR report when it came out, but not in much depth, and the issue’s worth reviewing.
So the FTA Senate Committee’s final report is out now, and there are some more explicit recommendations from the Labor members. Here’s the cliff’s notes.
Tue, 03 Aug 2004
Motion
That the Committee recommend that the Senate agree to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement Implementation Bill.
For: Senators Cook, Conroy, O’Brien, Brandis, Ferris, Boswell
Against: Senators Ridgeway, Harris
Summary of Senate inquiry into the FTA
Told you so.
me, right here, right now
Fri, 25 Jun 2004
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.
Tue, 04 May 2004
Linux Australia's FTA Submission
(For those playing along at home, this is about the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States, which includes an IP chapter that requires Australia to change its copyright and patent law to line up more with the DMCA and the US Patent Office. I’ve commented on this previously.)
Anyway, today’s post is to note that Linux Australia’s submission (#183) has finally been accepted, as has Rusty Russell’s (#184). It’s a bit weird that it took so long to accept them – they were submitted on time (ie, weeks ago), yet seem to have been accepted only after the ABC’s submission which was very late (it’s dated 30th April), and concurrent with the ASX submission which appears to have only been sent in yesterday. Weird. On the other hand, they might’ve been not quite compliant with the rules for submissions (which require addresses and such for individuals at least), so maybe that was the problem.
In other news, Matthew Rimmer from the ANU (submission 27) appeared as a witness before the committee today, and the Australian Digital Alliance (submission 71) did likewise yesterday. It’ll be interesting to see what the committee thinks of their opinions when the transcripts of those sessions come out.
Thu, 15 Apr 2004
From my email today:
Thank you for your interest in the Committee’s inquiry into the Australia USA Free Trade Agreement your comments are appreciated and will be formally acknowledged in due course.
Fran Wilson
Office Administrator
Joint Standing Committee on Treaties
Sweet.
In other news, the JSCT public hearings start their Oz tour on Monday, so if you didn’t get a mail like the above today, you might like to make sure you go to one of those to help ensure Australian has decent IP law.
Sat, 10 Apr 2004
Submissions to Parliamentary Commissions
So, Mary Gardiner, civic-minded lady she is, mentioned that she was going to have a go at making a submission to the senate on the FTA and it’s effect on Linux and free software and that she’d probably put whatever she came up with online.
Michael Davies replied that
You aren’t allowed to make your submission to either the lower house or senate committees public at all. The committee will make submissions public later at their own discretion.
This struck me as pretty unbelievable, but no, the Parliament House’s FAQ on Preparing a submission to a Parliamentary Committee Inquiry says:
Once a submission is received by a committee, it cannot be withdrawn or altered without the committee’s permission, nor can it be published or disclosed to any other person unless or until the committee has authorised its publication.
Pretty fascist, hey? But hey, you know the saying: don’t ascribe to maliciousness that which can be explained by stupidity. Here’s another one: don’t ascribe to stupidity that which can be explained by misinterpretation. Looking for more detail, specifically an explanation of where the heck that restriction comes from, leads to a page about Senate enquiries, which in turn gives you a pointer to more information about contributing to committee enquiries, which has a PDF about submissions to senate committee enquiries. That says:
5. A submission to a committee becomes a committee document, and must not be disclosed to any other person until it has been released (‘published’) by the committee. Unless you have requested that the submission remain confidential, it is normally published after the committee has received and examined it and authorised its publication. Once a committee has authorised the release of a submission, subsequent publication of it is protected by parliamentary privilege (see below). The content of a submission may be published in another form or for another purpose before the submission is released by the committee, but this publication will not be protected by parliamentary privilege.
…
8. Making a submission is protected by parliamentary privilege. It is an offence for anyone to try to stop you from making a submission by threats or intimidation. It is an offence for anyone to harass you or discriminate against you because you have made a submission. The content of the submission is also protected but only after the committee has accepted it. This means that what you say in the submission, once the committee has accepted it, cannot be used in court against you or anyone else. More information is available in another brochure, entitled ‘Procedures to be observed by Senate committees for the protection of witnesses’.
Three things to note:
One: Aside from some terminology, you can publish your submission yourself, but you might be better of not doing so.
Two: If you don’t publish it, you get to be protected by parliamentary privilege! How cool is that? Anyone you want to libel? Now’s your chance!
Three: While it’s forbidden to harass people for submitting, it doesn’t say anything about harassing people for not submitting. Ha! Consider yourself forewarned!
Wed, 07 Apr 2004
If we’re ever going to do anything about the problems various copyright laws and patents cause us, we have to start sometime. Linux Australia is starting now, and focussing on the Australia/United States Free Trade Agreement. They have a page full of information up at http://www.linux.org.au/fta/. If you’re an Australian, you’ll be affected by these changes, so go read that page, and then follow up on it.
The easiest way to follow up on it is by signing the petition that’s been setup by the Linux Australia committee. We’ve tried to make it something that’s strong, but that can be supported by all sorts of folks who develop, admin, use, or otherwise support or rely on free software. If your parents, or boss, or clients get value from open source, please point them at the petition, explain what and why the concerns are, and ask them if they’ll consider supporting it. By some estimates we might need as many as ten thousand signatures to get results, so every single one is important.
If you’re not confident just signing a petition will do any good, there’s lots of other things you can do recommended at the Linux Aus FTA site. Every little bit helps.